Influence of materials knowledge level on the assessment of the shear strength characteristic value of existing RC beams

A procedure to determine the shear strength characteristic value (Vrck) is presented and applied to two existing RC beams extracted from an old structure built in Italy in the early 1900s. Several nondestructive tests (NDT) and destructive tests (DT) were performed, and the experimental outcomes show a great variability of the compressive strength in the same beam. For this reason, Vrck values were calculated for each beam, assuming different knowledge levels about the concrete compressive strength. The procedure results are compared to those obtained by applying a traditional Bayesian updating procedure, where the updating basic variables (represented by the concrete strength) was determined by using indirect measures of strength as a prior information