To investigate the flexural behaviors of steel reinforced engineered cementitious composite (ECC) beams, the behaviors of the steel reinforced ECC beam and the conventional steel reinforced concrete beam subjected to flexural load are experimentally compared. The experimental results show that the flexural strength and ductility of the steel reinforced ECC beam are 24.8% and 187.67% times larger than those of the steel reinforced concrete beam, and the substitution of concrete with ECC can significantly delay the propagation of cracks. Additionally, a simplified constitutive model of the ECC material is used to simulate the flexural behaviors of beams by the finite element analysis (FEA). The results show a good agreement between the simulation and test results. The crack width of the steel reinforced ECC beam can be limited to 0.4 mm under the service load conditions. The application of ductile ECC can significantly increase the flexural performance in terms of flexural strength, deformation capacity and ductility of the beams.
An engineered cementitious composite (ECC) is introduced to partially substitute concrete in the tension zone of a reinforced concrete beam to form an ECC/reinforced concrete (RC) composite beam, which can increase the ductility and crack resisting ability of the beam. Based on the assumption of the plane remaining plane and the simplified constitutive models of materials, the stress and strain distributions along the depth of the composite beam in different loading stages are comprehensively investigated to obtain calculation methods of the load-carrying capacities for different stages. Also, a simplified formula for the ultimate load carrying capacity is proposed according to the Chinese code for the design of concrete structures. The relationship between the moment and curvature for the composite beam is also proposed together with a simplified calculation method for ductility of the ECC/RC composite beam. Finally, the calculation method is demonstrated with the test results of a composite beam. Comparison results show that the calculation results have good consistency with the test results, proving that the proposed calculation methods are reliable with a certain theoretical significance and reference value.
The flexural behavior of eight FRP ( fiber reinforced polymer) strengthened RC (reinforced concrete) beams with different steel corrosion rates are numerically studied by Ansys finite element software. The influences of the corrosion rate on crack pattern, failure mechanism, ultimate strength, ductility and deformation capacity are also analyzed. Modeling results show that the beams with low corrosion rates fail by the crushing of the concrete in the compression zone. For the beams with medium corrosion rates, the bond slip between the concrete and the longitudinal reinforcement occurs after steel yielding, and the beams finally fail by the debonding of the FRP plates. For the beams with high corrosion rates, the bond slip occurs before steel yielding, and the beams finally fail by the crushing of the concrete in the compression zone. The higher the corrosion rates of the longitudinal reinforcement, the more the carrying capacity of FRP strengthened RC beams reduces. The carrying capacity of RCB-1 (the corrosion rate is 0) is 115 kN, and the carrying capacity of RCB-7 (the corrosion rate is 20% ) is 42 kN. The deformation capacity of FRP strengthened corroded RC beams is higher than that of FRP strengthened uucorroded RC beams. The ultimate deflection of RCB-1 and RCB-7 are 20 mm and 35 nun, respectively, and the ultimate deflection of RCB-5 (the corrosion rate is 10% ) reaches 60 ilUn.