Analytical study on flexural behaviour of fiber and steel reinforced concrete beams

Hybrid Reinforced Concrete (HRC) is a composite material with a combination of rebars and fibers to reinforce concrete. In this study, the behavior of HRC beams under flexure is studied. To model HRC, steel and concrete under compression were assumed to be elastic-perfectly plastic. For concrete under tension, a three-linear model including elastic zone, transition zone, and residual tensile strength zone were used. Analytical relations to determine the depth of neutral axis and moment-curvature diagram at each level of loading were studied. In order to verify the model, the results obtained from the model were compared with those of published papers. It was realized that the relations obtained from this study, can predict the behavior of Fiber Reinforced Concrete (without rebar reinforcement), HRC, and traditional Reinforced Concrete under flexure with good accuracy. The proposed model, could predict the maximum load carrying capacity of HRC beams with an accuracy of more than 93% compared to experimental results. Taking into account the mentioned assumptions and proposed procedure it was found that the model is capable of predicting the behavior of all types of cement based composites: materials with strain-hardening, strain-softening, deflection-hardening and deflection-softening behavior.