Summary
Professor Robert Vollum joined Imperial College as a Lecturer in the early 1990s following a decade of working in industry. He has been a Reader in concrete structures since 2011. Dr Vollum's research interests are wide, encompassing the following topics: long-term deflections of reinforced concrete slabs, beam-column joints, shear in beams, punching shear, numerical modelling of reinforced concrete structures, strut and tie modelling, and control of early age thermal cracking.
He has developed a method for predicting the deflection of slabs that takes construction loading into account. The numerical work was calibrated with data from the in-situ concrete building at BRE Cardington with which he was closely involved. More recently, he led an EPSRC project (EP/D505488/1) which developed a design method for using concrete blinding as struts in cut and cover excavations. Recent work has focused on punching shear in flat slabs as well as shear enhancement near supports of beams.Currently, he is co-leading an EPSRC project (EP/T004142/1) into the cracking behaviour of reinforced concrete elements subjected to the restraint of imposed strains. This is a joint project with the University of Leeds (EP/T004185/1).
Professor Vollum also represents Concrete Society on BSI Committee for EC2 B/525/2 Structural Use of Concrete. He is a member of the subgroup of B/525/2 which is responsible for developing and maintaining the UK National Annex to EC2. He is also the UK technical expert on TG4 of WG1/CEN/TC 250/SC 2. TG4 is the European committee which is considering revisions to shear, punching and torsion in the next version of EC2 which is due in 2020. He is also a member of fib Task Group 4.2 which evaluates and develops models for ultimate limit states of concrete structures.
Publications
Journals
Pastore MVF, Vollum RL, 2022, Shear enhancement in RC beams without shear reinforcement simultaneously loaded within 2d and at 3d from supports, Structures, Vol:42, Pages:343-366
Pastore MVF, Vollum RL, 2022, Shear enhancement in RC beams with stirrups simultaneously loaded within 2d and at 3d from supports, Engineering Structures, Vol:264, ISSN:0141-0296, Pages:114408-114408
Elwakeel A, Vollum R, 2022, Shear enhancement in RC cantilevers with multiple point loads, Magazine of Concrete Research, Vol:74, ISSN:0024-9831, Pages:507-527
Conference
Elwakeel A, Shehzad M, El Khoury K, et al., INDUCED CRACKING IN EDGE RESTRAINED WALLS – FEA PARAMETRIC STUDY, fib International Congress 2022
Riedel K, Vollum R, Vella JP, et al., Experimental testing of a novel D-Frame connection under sudden column removal, fib International Congress 2022 Oslo