UTILIZAÇÃO DE TÉCNICAS DE OTIMIZAÇÃO NO DIMENSIONAMENTO DE VIGAS DE CONCRETO ARMADO.

Due an increasingly competitive market and companies seeking for free competition, a concern always present is cost reduction. This concern, nowadays, involves the environmental as well, and it is necessary to think about a reduction in the use of natural resources. Thus, structural systems must be designed so expectations such these can be satisfied, as long as they follow design criteria of building standards. The present paper aims to apply the concepts of optimization in the design of reinforced concrete beams with rectangular section. It also introduces a literature review of beam design and general concepts of optimization. Therefore, it is proposed the application of classic Newton method with exterior penalty to minimize the objective function (OF) of costs. The function is described by design criteria found in NBR 6118 (ABNT, 2014). Thus, it was verified the validation of calculation routine proposed (WJM_otimiza) and it was also verified the application of that routine in real problems. For the analysed cases, the beam cost varied between R$ 86,64 to R$ 453,24. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]