Abstract
Reinforced concrete (RC) beams containing a longitudinal cavity have become an innovative development and advantage for economic purposes of light-weight members without largely affecting their resistance against the applied loads. This type of openings can also be used for maintenance purposes and usage space of communication lines, pipelines, etc. RC beams are primarily loaded in the plane of the members, which are two-dimensional in a plane stress state and the dominant structural behaviours include bending, shear, or combination of both. In the present study, six numerical models of RC beams with and without openings were simulated by using commercial finite element software ANSYS to evaluate the structural behaviours of those beam models under the partial uniformly distributed load. Different parameters were assessed, including opening dimensions and shear reinforcement ratios. The obtained numerical results were analysed and verified and were found very close to those obtained from the experimental investigations in the literature. The increase of shear reinforcement ratio could enhance the flexural and shear capacities of the RC beams, and the results also showed that some models sustained flexural failure while the others sustained failure of combined bending and shear.
Highlights
Concrete has been used widely around the world as a key construction material due to many reasons, including the availability of its raw ingredients, good durability and less required maintenance after construction, the reasonable construction cost, and high mechanical properties in terms of compressive strength in comparing with other materials, e.g., steel and timber
Ab-Buildings 2021, 11, 391 bass et al [32] investigated the flexural behaviours of solid and hollow Reinforced concrete (RC) beams subjected to four-point bending, and the studied parameters included the addition of steel fibres, the percentage reduction in the void size, the longitudinal reinforcement ratio and the use of lateral stirrups
Vijayakumar and Madhavi [36] experimentally studied the behaviour of hollow RC beams strengthened with different types of fibres and indicated that with a specified content of the used fibres, the loading capacity of the hollow beams was significantly enhanced under both compression and flexure
Summary
Concrete has been used widely around the world as a key construction material due to many reasons, including the availability of its raw ingredients, good durability and less required maintenance after construction, the reasonable construction cost, and high mechanical properties in terms of compressive strength in comparing with other materials, e.g., steel and timber. Concrete has a lower resistance against tensile forces and is heavy It can be used in combination with steel bars to resist external forces based on its own high compressive strength and the high tensile strengths of the latter [1,2], whereas the heavy self-weight of concrete can be compensated by adopting various solutions, e.g., using composite materials, lightweight and recycled aggregates [3,4,5,6,7]. Openings on the cross-sections of the structural RC members like beams can be used to largely reduce their self-weights [2,8]. For aesthetic, economic, and functional purposes including leaving spaces for mechanical and electrical supply lines, computer networks, water and sewage pipelines, and reducing member weight to save materials, the openings in RC beams and slabs have become popular in the construction of buildings, bridges, offshore structures, and towers [9,10,11,12]. Other studies have investigated structural behaviours of RC beams with longitudinal openings [8,9,10,11,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39], and these studies are related to the current study and can be divided into two big groups, i.e., experimental and numerical studies in a chronological order
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