Experimental investigation on seismic performance of plain engineered cementitious composite beams

Abstract

The authors proposed using plain engineered cementitious composite (ECC) in construction without aligned reinforcement. In this study, ECC with a tensile strain capacity of up to 10% was produced, which has a comparable deformability level to steel reinforcement. To demonstrate the feasibility of plain ECC construction, five plain ECC beams and two steel reinforced concrete reference beams were prepared, and four-point bending reversed cyclic loading tests were conducted on the beam specimens. The experimental tests indicated that the plain ECC beams showed more stable hysteresis loops with improved energy dissipation capacity, deformation restoring capacity, and lower stiffness degradations than normal RC beams. Two categories of failure modes were observed, i.e., flexural failure mode and shear failure mode. With the increase in the shear span ratio, the failure mode of ECC beams changed from shear failure to flexural failure. Additionally, the increase in sectional dimension had a positive influence on the stiffness and energy dissipation capacity of ECC beams. It is experimentally verified that the plain ECC beams have sufficient load-bearing capacity under static and seismic loading.