Experimental Study on Shear Strength of Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete Beams

Abstract

Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) beams has greater shear strength than typical reinforced concrete beams due to the high tensile strength of steel fibers. In this research, an experiment has been conducted to investigate the shear behavior of SFRC beams, and especially, the portion of shear resistance by uncracked compressive concrete section has been measured. Based on the test results in this study and 87 test data collected from literature, the accuracy of the existing equations for the estimation of shear strength has been evaluated. The shear strength of SFRC beams increased as more steel fibers were mixed. However, it is considered that the most efficient amount of steel fiber for enhancement of shear strength would be between 1% and 2% in that the specimen with 0.5% of steel fibers were abruptly failed after inclined cracking, and that the specimen with 2.0% of steel fibers showed a relatively low efficiency in increasing shear strength. The portion of shear resistance by the uncracked compressive concrete section was measured to be greater than 21%, and the equation proposed by Oh et al. provided the best accuracy on the estimation of shear strength of SFRC beams among the approaches evaluated in this study.