Assessment of Corbel Damages in Concrete Parking Structures

In the more than sixty years of experience in forensic structural engineering of Adviesbureau Hageman, damages in concrete parking structures in The Netherlands repeatedly passed by. In a study on these damages, mainly based on the comprehensive archive of Adviesbureau Hageman, an overview of the various damages that can be distinguished is made. Furthermore, one category of damages, that is not limited to only parking structures, but generally occurring in concrete structures, is damage to concrete corbels. In order to investigate the behaviour of such corbels under load imposed by the concrete elements that they support, finite element analyses (FEA) are performed with the FE Code ATENA. It was found that damage only occurred in case the bearing material was situated at the edge of the corbel or with an additional horizontal load. In both cases the corbel withstood a rather significant load. In the paper the basic findings of the overview of damages in concrete parking structures and the study on corbel behaviour are presented.