THE BEHAVIOR OF PFRC BEAMS WITH AND WITHOUT WEB REINFORCEMENT

Abstract

Numerous researches have focused on thecontribution of steel fibers to the shear and flexural behavior of reinforcedconcrete (RC) beams without web reinforcement. While it has been shown that theaddition of steel fibers makes concrete tougher and more ductile, there existsa relatively limited amount of studies concerning the shear behavior ofpolypropylene fiber reinforced concrete (PFRC) beams. For this purpose, anexperimental program was carried out for investigating the shear behavior ofPFRC beams. This paper presents the test results of PFRC beams with and withoutweb reinforcement. It is shown that the use of polypropylene fibers improved theshear capacities of RC beams. However, the additional shearresistance provided by polypropylene fibers was not sufficient to overcome theshear demand and change the failure mode from shear to flexure.