The Institute of Structural Concrete (IMB) is a member of the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the RWTH Aachen University. Currently the staff consists of about 24 research engineers, 19 industrial employees, 6 trainees and 29 student research assistants. Professor Hegger is the director of the IMB since 1993 and shared this responsibility with Professor Martin Claßen since September 2021.
The seminars and lectures of the Institute of Structural Concrete provide students with the fundamentals of the design and assessment of concrete, reinforced concrete and prestressed concrete construction, taking into account both technical and economic aspects. Due to the range of specialized building materials, the variety of forms of construction and the continuing development of new materials, the primary emphasis is on basic principles and methodological approaches. In the future, interdisciplinary cooperation with other participants involved in planning processes will assume a greater role.
The Institute has over 35 years of fundamental and applied research experience in the fields of load-bearing and deformation behavior as well as in reinforced concrete, prestressed concrete and composite concrete construction. Its research activities involve the clarification of outstanding issues resulting from the ongoing development of building materials (e.g., high-performance and textile-reinforced concrete) and in the future will focus on integrated building concepts and sustainable construction principles, which in turn will demand more intensive interdisciplinary research cooperation. The following topics are of particular significance:
- The development of construction and assessment guidelines for all kinds of reinforced and prestressed concrete
- Sustainable design and fabrication of building structures
- Durability and operational stability of solid construction components
- Development and application of nonmetallic reinforcement for new construction, renovation, fortification (representative institute of the Collaborative Research Centre 532 “Textile-reinforced Concrete – Fundamentals for the Development of an Innovative Technology”; participation in BMBF-2020-Research Cluster “Carbon Concrete Composite C3”)
- Composite construction in building and bridge construction
- Fortification and strengthening of existing building structures
- Macro- and meso-level numerical modeling
The laboratory of the IMB consists of an extensive test equipment to carry out static and cyclic tension-, compression, and bending-tests on specimens. Development and manufacturing of the testing equipment can be created in our own machine shop. The numerical simulation is ensured by software-tools for design and dimensioning of concrete structures. Here industrial software is also available as FE-Programs, which are developed at the IMB. Hence an adaption of the FE-Tools to new questions is possible.