EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SHEAR STRENGTH OF CONCRETE BEAMS REINFORCED WITH LONGITUDINAL TENSION STEEL

Laterally loaded reinforced concrete beams may fail in shear before their full flexural strengths are attained if they are not adequately designed for shear. Unlike flexural failures, shear failures are very sudden and unexpected. A thorough knowledge of the different modes of shear failure and the mechanisms involved is necessary to prevent them. Shear strength of concrete is an important consideration in the design of RC members. In situations, where use of steel stirrups becomes impractical or difficult to provide such as RC slab, the intrinsic shear strength of the concrete becomes all important. For concrete of low shear strength, quite often the concrete cross-section size needs to be enhanced only to provide for the high shear demand. It is, therefore, pertinent to study the shear strength of concrete. The present describe the experimental investigation on shear strength of concrete beams reinforced with longitudinal tension steel. The primary design variables were the shear span-to-depth ratio in terms of depth of beam and amount of longitudinal reinforcement. The study aims to investigate the effect of increasing percentage of longitudinal reinforcement and depth of beams in terms of shear span-to-depth ratio on shear strength of concrete. Test results show that, the depth of beam in terms of shear span-to-depth ratio is highly influencing parameter of shear strength of concrete in addition to the amount of longitudinal reinforcement and concrete compressive strength. This aspect is not reflected in the Indian Standard [4]