Wide-shallow beams with and without steel fibres: A peculiar behaviour in shear and flexure

Experimental analysis of the efficiency of steel fibers on shear strength of beams

“…Besides resistance increase, current scenario reveals that the structural behavior of the SFRC beams is slightly variable even with different fiber contents. Kang et al (2012) and Conforti et al (2013) reported a similar behavior. Reinforcement conditions of the beams, ρflex=0.91% and ρw=ρw,min=0.08%, should be borne in mind for an explanation of the event.…”

Influence of polypropylene fibre reinforcement and width-to-effective depth ratio in wide-shallow beams

“…The transducers for measuring the shear crack width were placed with an inclination of 140°to the horizontal line. This instrumentation was based on experimental observations from previous similar experiments [15].…”

“…Note that the designation W430, as an example, refers to a beam 430 mm wide. The chosen beam geometries are rather common in the field, especially in residential building [15].…”

“…In this manuscript, the experimental evidences underline by Conforti et al [15] about WSBs, not generally acknowledged by the scientific community [17,18], will be further evaluated and commented. Finally, the experimental results of PC WSBs will be also compared against the predictions of Eurocode 2 (EC2 in the following) [19], ACI 318-11 [20] and Model Code 2010-Final Draft (hereafter MC2010) [21,22].…”

“…the influence of width-to-effective depth ratio (b/d) on the shear bearing capacity. Previous experimental tests on PC and SFRC WSBs conducted by Conforti et al [15,16] have shown that the ratio b/d influences both the failure mechanism and the bearing capacity, with positive implications both in shear (extra resistance with multiple cracking) and flexure (ductility). Since the ratio b/d previously studied was in the range from around 3.5 to 4.5, the present experimental campaign widen this range up to b/d = 2, covering further cases of WSBs.…”