ORIGINAL ARTICLE Inﬂuence of quality control of concrete on structural reliability: assessment using a Bayesian approach Robby Caspeele • Miroslav Sykora • Luc Taerwe Received: 3 April 2012 / Accepted: 9 March 2013 Ó RILEM 2013 Abstract Quality inspection plays an important role in the production process of concrete, as it inherently stimulates producers for obtaining a higher perfor- mance with respect to the investigated properties. In case of the conformity assessment of concrete com- pressive strength, the concrete strength distribution is ﬁltered due to the rejection or acceptance of certain batches and this ﬁlter effect can be quantiﬁed using Bayesian updating techniques. As a consequence of the ﬁlter effect, conformity control has a positive inﬂuence on the structural reliability of concrete structures. This ﬁlter effect can be quantiﬁed by using an approximation method as developed herein or also by using classical FORM/SORM techniques. In order to illustrate the inﬂuence of conformity control on structural reliability, concrete elements (columns and beams) which are designed according to the Euro- codes, are analysed considering basic limit state equations, i.e. for compression and bending. More- over, the inﬂuence of the reinforcement ratio and the load ratio on the ﬁlter effect is investigated. Numerical analyses reveal that the ﬁlter effect may positively inﬂuence especially reliability of lightly reinforced concrete members exposed to compression. It appears that it has a minor effect where reinforcement properties govern failure. Keywords Quality control  Conformity assessment  Concrete  Compressive strength  Filter effect  Structural reliability  Bayesian updating 1 Introduction A proper choice of suitable parameters for stochastic models for material properties is necessary in order to obtain representative results when performing a structural reliability analysis. In construction, several levels of quality inspection are executed in order to verify the speciﬁed quality of the constituents, struc- tural elements and execution. These quality inspection strategies should be taken into consideration, as they inﬂuence distributional characteristics and conse- quently also the structural reliability. Bayesian statistics form a suitable basis for updat- ing the distributional material parameters when addi- tional information from quality inspection is available. Not only direct test results can be used to update R. Caspeele (&)  L. Taerwe Magnel Laboratory for Concrete Research, Department of Structural Engineering, Ghent University, Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 904, 9052 Ghent, Belgium e-mail: Robby.Caspeele@UGent.be URL: http://www.labomagnel.ugent.be L. Taerwe e-mail: Luc.Taerwe@UGent.be M. Sykora Klokner Institute, Czech Technical University in Prague, Solinova 7, 166 08 Praha 6, Dejvice, Czech Republic e-mail: miroslav.sykora@klok.cvut.cz URL: www.klok.cvut.cz Materials and Structures DOI 10.1617/s11527-013-0048-y