Rebar

Rebar (short for reinforcing bar), also known as reinforcing steel, reinforcement steel and colloquially in Australia as reo, is a steel bar or mesh of steel wires used as a tension device in reinforced concrete and reinforced masonry structures to strengthen and hold the concrete in tension. Rebar's surface is often patterned to form a better bond with the concrete.

History

Originally, concrete structures were unreinforced. Rebar has been used in construction since at least the 15th century; for example, 2500 m of rebars were used in the Château de Vincennes.

More recently, during the 18th century, rebar was used to form the carcass of the Leaning Tower of Nevyansk in Russia, built on the orders of the industrialist Akinfiy Demidov. The cast iron used for the rebar was of high quality, and there is no corrosion on them to this day. The carcass of the tower was connected to its cast iron tented roof, crowned with one of the first known lightning rods. More recently these techniques have been refined by embedding the steel bars in the concrete, and by the introduction of deformed bars to improve bonding, thus producing modern reinforced concrete.

Rebar (Taiwan)

The Rebar Group (Rebar; Chinese: 力霸集團; pinyin: Lìbà Jítuán) is a large corporation involved in domestic textiles, construction, hotel/real estate, retail services, vehicle/building insurance, banking, and media in Taiwan.

The company started out in the 1960s as a reinforcement bar manufacturer, hence its name.

The corporation recently gained large shares of the Taiwanese cable media as OmniMedia (東森) TV Corp and also mobile telephone business as Asia Pacific Telecom Group (亞太) in the late 1990s.

Towards the end of 2006 Rebar was encountering serious difficulties following years of allegedly hiding financial problems with bad loans from The Chinese Bank. The CEO and founder, Wang You-theng (王又曾) is alleged to have engaged in insider trading and embezzlement in connection to this, and fled Taiwan on 30 December 2006, days before prosecutors began their investigation. You-theng is currently detained in the US, and is wanted by Taiwanese prosecutors for allegedly embezzling NT$60 billion (US$1.8 billion) in corporate funds .