Sources: American Concrete Institute, Farmington Hills, Mich.; CP staff
In accordance with its standardization procedure, ACI has opened public discussion for the completely reorganized ACI 318-14, “Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete and Commentary,” with comments on the document relayed through an official submittal form by June 17.
“Members of ACI Committee 318 have been actively working on this completely reorganized Code for over 10 years, and have collectively dedicated over 96,000 work hours to improve its usability and increase confidence among all Code users,” said Randall Poston, Ph.D., P.E., S.E., Chair, ACI Committee 318. “At this stage, the committee encourages Code users and those interested in ACI 318 to visit the web portal at www.concrete.org/ACI318, download and review the complete draft of ACI 318-14, and provide the Institute with insight and comments for further improvements.”
Augmenting traditional communication channels, ACI and Poston will host a #ACI318 Twitter Chat May 14 at 1:00 p.m. EST; participants can tweet @concreteACI with #ACI318 to weigh in.
ACI 318-14 has been completely reorganized for greater ease of use and to address design requirements for specific member types, such as beams, columns, walls, and diaphragms. All design provisions for a specific member type are now contained within a single chapter. The committee also enhanced the readability of the document by developing the various member chapters to have parallel organization, with unified syntax, style, and format among the chapters, thus providing users with an explicit roadmap of relevant provisions. Also, the committee changed provisions that previously referred to generic elements, such as “flexural members,” to explicitly apply to specific member types.
This new organization will provide increased confidence that a design satisfies all code requirements, notes the committee. Many lengthy provisions were parsed into multiple shorter provisions addressing single requirements, and several provisions were defined using tables. The increased use of graphs and tables instead of text provides clearer presentation of the information. Code language was edited for consistent use of terms and symbols.
The 2014 edition of ACI 318-14 “Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete” is expected to be available in fall 2014, and be referenced in the 2015 edition of the International Building Code. The draft can be reviewed at www.concrete.org/ACI318.