Strength and behaviour of steel fibre reinforced rubcrete deep beams

Abstract

Reports of the National Disaster Management Authority of India reveal that about newline59% of India s land is under the threat of moderate to severe seismic hazard. The newline newlinefailure of lifeline structures like bridges and critical structural members in high- newlinerise buildings like transfer girders will catastrophize the damages resulting from newline newlinesevere earthquakes. The key property of a structural member that influences its newlinestrength during an earthquake is its ductility. Hence, in order to improve the newlineseismic performance of any structure it must be cast using materials having good newlineductility. Concrete, which is a brittle material is the most commonly used newlineconstruction material. The shear predominance in concrete structural members newlinelike pier caps and transfer girders (which are usually considered as deep beams) newlinewill supplement in increasing the brittle behaviour of the whole structure, thus, newlineresulting in reducing the overall performance of the structure during the severe newlinenatural calamity such as an earthquake. Recent researches have revealed that newlineconcrete produced using crumb rubber as a partial replacement for aggregates newline(called as Rubcrete) has the potential to improve the ductility of conventional newlineconcrete. It will also help in reducing the overall mass of the structure. For a newlinedeveloping country like India, adopting such an innovative construction material newlinewith enhanced ductility will help in improving the resistance of newly built newlineinfrastructures against earthquakes. Even though Rubcrete has good performance newlinein terms of ductility, a major drawback observed while using Rubcrete is the newlinereduction in compressive, tensile and flexural strengths. Based on the literature newlinesurvey, it is observed that a lot of researches are being conducted to find a newlinesupplementing method to reduce these limitations of Rubcrete, so that a new newlineconstruction material with improved ductility and lower mass can be developed newlineand used for the construction of structures in earthquake prone areas.