Research progress and low-carbon property of reinforced concrete block masonry structures in China

With the rapid development of economy, China constructs up to 2 billion square meters new buildings in urban area per year, which mainly uses cast-in-place reinforced concrete technics with serious wastes and pollutions. Meanwhile, the reinforced concrete block masonry structure, which has the advantages of low steel usage and project cost, gets a lot of application in China, especially in Heilongjiang Province in recent years. Based on a large amount of experimental and numerical analysis, progresses have been achieved for the research of reinforced concrete block masonry structures in China. The present study introduces the latest research contents from the aspects of applicable height of the structure system, development of fabricated technics, and carbon emission property compared to concrete structures. The results show that, firstly, the innovated structure system can extend the applicable height to 100 meters for typical residential and office buildings, and a 98.8 meters office building (the tallest building using this structure system at present) has been built up in Harbin, China; secondly, fabricated technics could be used for reinforced concrete block masonry structure with some potential advantages; finally, through case studies, this structure system is shown to be greener since it has lower carbon emissions compared with cast-in-place concrete structure during construction phase.