Symposium on Concrete Plasticity and its Application

On 23rd July 2007 a Symposium was held at Emmanuel College Cambridge on the theme of Concrete Plasticity and its application. It was held to mark the retirement later this year of Chris Morley. The attendees at the symposium wished to acknowledge his tremendous contributions to the study of plasticity in concrete. The first major conference on the subject was held at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, Copenhagen in 1979, under the auspices of IABSE and the chairmanship of Prof Bruno Thurlimann. Since then, the principles of plasticity have been incorporated into the design procedures for most concrete structures, although the link is not always made explicit. Virtually all designs for flexure, all code rules for shear, and all analyses of slabs, both for punching shear and bending, rely on the fact that the Safe Load Theorem applies to concrete structures. Major problems are now being caused because the current generation of young engineers believe the results of their nonlinear finite element analyses. It would be interesting to know whether any of them could actually quote the lower bound theorem; they would probably be horrified to compare the actual stresses in their structures with the values they have assumed.

The organisers would like to thank Parsons Brinckerhoff, Atkins, The Happold Trust, Cobras, Trinity College, and Emmanuel College for contributing to the costs of holding the symposium and publishing the proceedings.

Copies of the proceedings can be purchased from Nami Norman <nn231@eng.cam.ac.uk>, Dept of Engineering, University of Cambridge, price £10 including post and packing.

Name	Affiliation	Paper Title
Chris Morley	University of Cambridge	When Plasticity?
Mik Braestrup	Ramboll	Yield Line Theory and Concrete Plasticity
Michael Collins, Evan Bentz, Edward Sherwood & Liping Xie	University of Toronto	An adequate theory for the shear strength of reinforced concrete structures
John Eyre	University College London	Geometric considerations of plasticity in structural concrete analysis and design
Ashraf Ashour & Keun-Hyeok Yang	University of Bradford	Application of plasticity theory to reinforced concrete deep beams
K Baskaran	University of Moratuwa	Irregular flat slabs designed according to structural membrane approach
Chris Burgoyne & Andy Smith	University of Cambridge	Automated Lower-bound analysis of slabs
Douglas Clyde	University of Western Australia	Affinity Properties of Truss Model Nodes
Steve Denton & Chris Morley	Parsons Brinckerhoff	Accounting for bi-axial bending in yield line analysis of reinforced concrete slabs
Tim Ibell & Steve Denton	University of Bath	Recent applications of plasticity theory to concrete shear problems
Colin Gurley	TAFENSW Sydney	Disproportionate collapse at lost corner columns
Jacques Heyman	University of Cambridge	Unreinforced Concrete Plasticity
Kamal Jaafar	Balamand University	Shear behavior of reinforced concrete beams with confinement near plastic hinges
Peter Lowe	University of Sydney	Where to from here?
Ian May	Heriot-Watt University	Why isn't the Morley sandwich approach to slab reinforcement used every time?
Cam Middleton	University of Cambridge	Generalised collapse analysis of concrete bridges
Ganga Prakhya	Sir Robert McAlpine	Plasticity applications in reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete structures
Wendel Sebastian	University of Bristol	Analysis of concrete structures across the ductility spectrum
Robin Spence	University of Cambridge	Earthquake loss estimation for reinforced concrete buildings: some problems

Morley Symposium on Concrete Plasticity and its Application

23rd July 2007