A Comparative Experimental Investigation on Laced Reinforced Concrete Beam and Conventional Beam under Monotonic Loading

Abstract

Abstract Laced Reinforced Concrete (LRC) structural elements are generally used in the defence environments where the structure encounters blast/impulsive loading. It comprises of equal number of reinforcements in both the faces of the beam with lacings as shear reinforcements bent at 450 along the plane of principal bending and fastened in position by cross rod. This paper presents the performance of LRC beam by experimental investigation and compared with conventional Reinforced Concrete (RC) beam using four point flexural load testing. Experimental results indicate that the LRC beam perform well than the RC beam considering the deformation. Failure modes could not be ascertained, since the experiments were stopped due to limitations in test set-up. At this stage, the support rotation achieved by LRC beam and RC beam is found to be 4.70 and 2.430 respectively. The LRC beam is found to be more ductile than RC beam. The structural response of LRC beam and RC beam is compared and presented.