Calibrating safety factors for Carbon Concrete: An approach based upon safety margins demonstrated with selected examples

Safety factors are a decisive topic within the framework of a semi‐probabilistic safety concept as is common practice in civil engineering. Long‐time experience is not available for new, innovative reinforcing materials like carbon concrete. Therefore the current paper outlines an approach involving level‐II reliability methods for a comparison of its results with those of a deterministic calculation approach using partial safety factors. The aim is an economical calibration of the material specific factor for carbon concrete. Afterwards an evaluation of the result's quality is performed by the adoption of more precise level‐III reliability methods on specific scenarios. A major subject is the pre‐set value of the FORM sensitivity factor α R in the valid calibration procedure according to [1].