Hydraulics

In designing water storage tanks, movement joints can be installed in parallel with steel reinforcement. To control the movement of concrete due to seasonal variation of temperature, hydration temperature drop and shrinkage etc. two principal methods in design are used: to design closely spaced steel reinforcement to shorten the spacing of cracks, thereby reducing the crack width of cracks; or to introduce movement joints to allow a portion of movement to occur in the joints.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this. For 30m long tanks wall, for a seasonal variation of 35 degree plus the hydration temperature of 30^oC, the amount of cracking is about 8.8mm. It can either be reduced to 0.3mm with close spacing or can be absorbed by movement joints. Anyway, the
thermal movement associated with the seasonal variation of 35^oC is commonly accounted for by movement joints.

For water-retaining structure like pumping stations, the crack width requirement is even more stringent in which 0.2mm for severe and very severe exposure is specified in BS8007. It turns out to a difficult problem to designers who may choose to design a heavy reinforced structure. Obviously, a better choice other than provision of bulky reinforcement is to allow contraction movement by using the method of movement joints together with sufficient amount of reinforcement. For instance, service reservoirs in Water Supplies Department comprise grids of movement joints like expansion joints and contraction joints.

This question is taken from book named – A Self Learning Manual – Mastering Different Fields of Civil Engineering Works (VC-Q-A-Method) by Vincent T. H. CHU.

Since service reservoirs are designed as water-retaining structures with stringent requirement of crack width control, the design of reinforcement of service reservoirs is under the control of serviceability limit state. For the walls of service reservoirs, contraction and expansion of concrete are more significant in the horizontal direction of walls because of their relatively long lengths when compared with heights. In this connection, in order to minimize the usage of reinforcement, horizontal bars are placed at the outmost layer so that the distance of reinforcement bars to concrete surface is reduced. Since the shorter is the distance to the point of concern, the smaller is the crack width and hence with such reinforcement arrangement advantages are taken if the reinforcement bars in the critical direction are placed closest to concrete surface.

This question is taken from book named – A Self Learning Manual – Mastering Different Fields of Civil Engineering Works (VC-Q-A-Method) by Vincent T. H. CHU.

For identical pumps with similar functions, if the pumps arranged in series, the total head is increased without a change to maximum discharge. On the other hand, for pumps arranged in parallel to one another, the discharge is increased without any changes to maximum head.

This question is taken from book named – A Self Learning Manual – Mastering Different Fields of Civil Engineering Works (VC-Q-A-Method) by Vincent T. H. CHU.

In water tightness test of water retaining structures, it normally requires the filling of water at a uniform rate or letting the water pool stand alone for some time before actual measurement is carried out. The reason for such provision in watertightness test is to allow sufficient time for water absorption to take place in concrete. After allowing sufficient time for water absorption to occur, the subsequent measurement of a fall in water level is deemed to be caused by water leakage instead of water absorption provided that adjustment has been made to other external effects such as evaporation.

This question is taken from book named – A Self Learning Manual – Mastering Different Fields of Civil Engineering Works (VC-Q-A-Method) by Vincent T. H. CHU.

The fulfillment of critical steel ratio means that in construction joints or planes of weakness of concrete structure, steel reinforcement will not yield and concrete fails in tension first. This is important in ensuring formation of more cracks by failure of concrete in tension, otherwise failure in steel reinforcement would produce a few wide cracks which is undesirable.

This question is taken from book named – A Self Learning Manual – Mastering Different Fields of Civil Engineering Works (VC-Q-A-Method) by Vincent T. H. CHU.