Shear behaviour of R. C. beams reinforced with swimmer bars

الملخص EN

Designers have to be very careful with respected to shear requirements in reinforced concrete (R.C.) elements due to their riskiness.

shear failure in R.C.

beams is considered an undesirable failure mode because shear cracks develop without any warning.

swimmer bars are web reinforcement system alternatives for traditional shear reinforcement.

swimmer bars are small diagonal bars, with both ends bend over horizontally and tied with top and bottom reinforcement.

the system of swimmer bars can be spliced, welded, or bolted and arranged in one or two rows.

in this paper, an experimental study is carried out to investigate the shear behaviour of R.C beams which reinforced with swimmer bars as web reinforcement.

fifteen R.C beams are experimentally tested under monotonic load to study the effect of the number of swimming bars, type of splice, splice length and concrete strength on shear behaviour.

the test results showed that using swimming bars as shear reinforcement increases the shear strength, stiffness, toughness as well as decreasing crack width, deflection values and the deformability of the tested beams.