A new approach to calculate the shear strength of high-performance reinforced concrete beams fibered with micro polypropylene (experimental and analytical study)

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Micro polypropylene (PP) fibers are commonly utilized to increase concrete's durability and fire resistance in building projects. High-Performance-Fiber-Concrete (HPFC) has become increasingly popular in the sustainable buildings industry in the past two decades. Some important structures were constructed using HPFC with micro polypropylene fibers to limit corrosion and increase fire resistance. This paper presents an experimental and analytical investigation to study the effect of micro PP fibers on the shear strength of HPFC beams with and without stirrups. The experimental results were used to obtain a new and simple approach that can calculate the shear strength of HPFC beams without needing for experimental findings. Also, the effect of PP fibers was compared with that of using steel (ST) fibers only or the hybridization of both PP and ST fibers. Twelve simply supported beams were fabricated and loaded with a concentrated load up to failure and all the required data were obtained and examined. The results indicated that adding PP fibers was effective in increasing both the shear capacity and the toughness of HPFC beams, either with or without stirrups, especially for beams with 1 % PP fibers. For beams without stirrups either with or without PP fibers, the mode of failure was diagonal tension shear failure. The presence of stirrups and / or ST fibers changed the failure mode from diagonal tension shear failure to compression shear failure. Analytically, a new approach of ten equations, was proposed based on the angle of compression struts and the splitting tensile concrete strength, to calculate the shear strength of HPFC beams. The equations of the proposed approach were compared with the results of forty five experimental specimens from four different research studies to examine their validity. The results were in a very good agreement and accuracy with the experimental results.