Shear strength of a reinforced concrete beam by PET fiber

Abstract

The shear strength and deformation of reinforced concrete beams have been investigated. For this purpose, an experiment was carried out in the laboratory for the purpose of casting and testing six reinforcement beams, designed to fail in shear, made of concrete containing different PET waste fibers. Direct shear strength of reinforced concrete by PET fiber was also studied via testing six push-off specimens. There is an improvement of the shear capacity of the reinforced concrete beam by 1% PET fiber volume, reached 11.1%. The improvement of direct shear capacity is 43.5% at 1.25% PET fiber volume. Also, the obtained test data demonstrated that adding PET fiber to the concrete beam is capable of changing mode of failure from shear to flexure in concrete beams. Deformations and cracking characteristics of beams and push-off specimens were all modified due to adding PET fiber. Equations have been proposed to calculate direct shear and shear strength of concrete and reinforced concrete beam via adding PET fiber through the usage of the current investigation and available data in Afroz et al. (Int J Sci Eng Technol Res IJSETR 2(9):1668–1672, 2013), Al-Hadithi and Abbas (Iraqi J Civ Eng 12:110–124, 2018), Nibudey et al. (Int J Mod Trends Eng Res IJMTER 02:58–65, 2015) and Prabha and George (Int J N Technol Res IJNTR 3(5):54–56)).