Behaviour of reinforced concrete beam strengthened in shear with geosynthetic

Abstract

The primary objective of this article is to focus on the experimental investigation of shear-deficient and geosynthetic-strengthened reinforced concrete beams. In this study, two varieties of geosynthetic, namely geogrid and geotextile, are used. The performances of shear-deficient reinforced concrete beams strengthened with geosynthetics under the single-point static monotonic loading are studied. It is observed that shear failure occurs in shear-deficient beam, but after strengthening the brittle shear failure changes to ductile flexure failure. A significant increment in flexural strength, ductility, energy absorption capacity and inelastic performance is observed in strengthened beams. The performance of geogrid is better in all respects when compared to the geotextile. The test results reveal that the use of geosynthetic not only increases the shear capacity but also remarkably improves the ductile behaviour of RC beams. In addition, conventional analytical methods are applied for the evaluation of the ultimate load, and the results are compared with the experimental findings, which show a good agreement between the analytical and experimental results.