Flexural behaviour of precast reinforced concrete beams bonded to steel-reinforced engineered cementitious composites

Abstract

Prefabricated concrete structures have attracted much attention due to their simple construction and reliable quality control. Due to the load requirements of transportation vehicles, the prefabricated concrete components must be divided into sections and then transported to be assembled in place. Therefore, the connection between prefabricated concrete beams significantly affects the mechanical behaviour of the structures. This paper proposes a new connection for prefabricated concrete beams bonded to reinforced engineered cementitious composites (ECC). Static experiments were carried out on a cast-in-place (CIP) beam and five precast concrete beams with different lengths or reinforcement ratios of steel-reinforced ECC. The cracking propagation, flexural capacity, beam stiffness, and strain distribution of the precast concrete beams were comparatively analysed. It is concluded that the flexural behaviour of the precast beams proposed in this study was similar to that of the CIP reference. Moreover, the flexural capacity of the prefabricated beams increased as the reinforcement ratio of steel-reinforced ECC. As the reinforcement ratio of steel-reinforced ECC increases from 1.67 % to 6.7 %, the corresponding flexural capacity of the prefabricated beams increase from 59.56 kN to 168.78 kN. Finally, a formula was established to predict the flexural capacity of prefabricated beams bonded to steel-reinforced ECC, and the theoretical results show good agreement with experimental results.