Experimental study on the behaviour of steel fibre when used as a secondary reinforcement in reinforced concrete beam

Abstract

There are many researches has been done to replace the constituent materials in the concrete to meet out the scarcity of the available raw materials and also, they have proven a successful one up to a certain level. But in this study, we are focused on to improve the structural behaviour by adding steel fibres in concrete without replacing any constituent materials. The scope of this project is to study experimentally the strength properties of the beam on inclusion of steel fibres. It also aims to investigate the structural behaviour of conventional concrete beams and steel fibre reinforced beam when steel fibre is used as a secondary reinforcement in beams. To overcome the deficiency of the conventional concrete, fibres have been added as secondary reinforcement. Steel fibres are added below the neutral axis of the RC beam in order to overcome the development of micro cracks under applied stress in the RC beam. The addition of steel fibres to the concrete has many advantages and the most notable among them is the improvement in the mechanical characteristics of the concrete. In our project steel fibres and modified steel fibres (adding fibres below the neutral axis) are added in the proportion of 1 % to the concrete. The tests for the fresh concrete and hardened concrete are carried out and their results are compared. The project is further extended to check the performance of the steel fibres in the reinforced concrete beams when they are added below the neutral axis. Two-point loading is applied to the structural members and the corresponding deflections are noted down. The performance of the SFRC beam and the modified steel fibre reinforced concrete (MFRC) beam is compared with the conventional RC beam. The discussions and conclusion are arrived based on the test results.