Effects of volume fraction to the strength and ductility of a small-scaled fibre reinforced concrete beam

Abstract

Due to advances in technology of materials, substitution of steel reinforcement with steel fibre becomes one of the possible solution for reducing the congestion of transverse reinforcement in concrete’s element structures. Previously, there are various researches done on laboratory work to investigate on mechanical behaviors such as tensile strength and flexural strength of steel fibre reinforced concrete beams. However, there is a limitation on the part of non-linear analysis modelling especially for concrete beams without steel reinforcement. Thus, validation of non-linear analysis data with the existing experimental data has to be done first followed by investigation on the effect of volume fraction of steel fibres on flexural strength of concrete beam. Non-linear Finite Element Analysis was carried out by using LUSAS V15 software. Three types of steel fibre with different length of 60mm, 50mm and 33mm were adopted in reinforced concrete beam with volume fraction of 0.25%, 0.50%, 0.75% and 1.00% for each fibre. In short, the flexural strength, stiffness and ductility begin to increase significantly when addition of steel fibre reach 0.75% and 1.00%. Long steel fibre perform better than short steel fibre in flexural, stiffness and ductility.