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Shear Strength of Concrete Beams Reinforced with Steel Welded Wire Fabric
Alhoubi, Yazan L.
Alhoubi, Yazan L.
Description
A Master of Science thesis in Civil Engineering by Yazan L. Alhoubi entitled, “Shear Strength of Concrete Beams Reinforced with Steel Welded Wire Fabric”, submitted in November 2019. Thesis advisor is Dr. Sami Tabsh. Soft copy is available (Thesis, Approval Signatures, Completion Certificate, and AUS Archives Consent Form).
Abstract
Reinforced concrete (RC) beams are typically reinforced transversely with steel stirrups to resist shear. However, this form of reinforcement requires extended time and considerable labor to make and place the stirrups, and results in large tolerances. Such shortcomings have encouraged researchers to seek alternatives methods of shear reinforcement. This study aims at researching the viability of using welded wire fabric (WWF), cold formed into the shape of a steel cage as shear reinforcement. A comprehensive literature review on this topic revealed scarce research about the use of WWF as shear reinforcement in RC beams. To accomplish the objective of the study, 23 half-scale beams that are 1900 mm or 2050 mm long with 200 mm x 300 mm cross- section are tested at AUS under a single-load configuration with consideration of different wire diameters (4, 6 and 8 mm), grid openings (25, 50 and 100 mm, concrete compressive strengths (30 and 35 MPa), shear span-to-thickness ratios (2.5 and 3.0), and transverse steel reinforcement ratios (251 and 505 N/mm). A comparison is carried out between the test results of WWF reinforced beams and corresponding stirrup reinforced beams in terms of the shear strength and ductility. The experimental study was complemented by a theoretical investigation utilizing the shear design provisions I n North American and European structural design codes. Results of the study showed that not all the vertical shear reinforcement in the WWF and stirrup reinforced beams reach yielding at ultimate and the shear span-to-depth ratio has no impact on the shear strength of such beams. The WWF reinforced beams possess 2-17% higher shear strength than corresponding stirrup reinforced beams and the ductility index of WWF reinforced beams matches the ductility index of corresponding stirrup reinforced beams. Beams containing WWF cages that consist of smaller diameter wires at narrow spacing exhibit slightly higher shear strength than corresponding ones containing larger diameter wires at wide spacing. The predicted shear strength by the ACI 318, Eurocode2, CSA23.3 and BS 8110 is within 6% of the strength obtained by the experiments. This shows that the current approaches for computing the shear strength of stirrup reinforced beams can be reliably used for WWF reinforced beams.