Effect of steel fiber on strengthening reinforced concrete beam

Concrete is weak in tension and strong in compression, However, concrete is a developing material and the relevant studies towards the change and development of concrete which researchers have carried out the date reveals that the developed concrete improves the behavior of structural member. Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete (SFC) is a type of concrete that is being studied to improve the mechanical behavior of structural members under different load conditions. In this thesis, compressive and splitting tensile strength of steel fiber reinforced concrete and flexural strength of steel fiber reinforced concrete beams were investigated during strengthening process. Moreover, finite element method based modeling of steel fiber reinforced concrete beams, which is used in order to determine the flexural strength, was investigated in this thesis. SFC samples of splitting tensile test reveals high strength values, while compression samples gain only 3.3% of improvement with added 1% of steel fiber dosage. In other hand, SFRC samples having a size of 100mm*100mm* 500mm shows better improvement according to the samples without steel fiber. In addition, improvement in flexural strength is checked with respect to curing time According to the results, flexural strength of SFRC samples in age of 7days shows good improvement as compared to the strength of RC samples in age of 7 days. As finite element modeling results are compared with the experimental results, it is observed that there is perfect agreement between them. Therefore, it can be concluded that finite element based modeling is a good technique in order to determine flexural strength of SFC samples.