SHEAR BEHAVIOUR OF R. C BEAMS REINFORCED WITH SWIMMER BARS

Abstract

: Designers have to be very careful against shear requirements in reinforced concrete elements due to its riskiness. Shear failure in R.C beams is considered not preferred mode, because shear cracks come in progress without any warnings. Swimmer bars are web reinforcement system alternatives for traditional shear reinforcement. Swimmer bars are small diagonal bars, with its 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 behavior of R.C beams reinforced with swimmer bars as web reinforcement. Fifteen R.C beams are experimentally tested under static load to study the effect of the number of swimming bars, type of splice, splice length and concrete strength in shear behavior. The test results showed that using of swimming bars as shear reinforcement increase the shear strength, stiffness, toughness as well as decreasing crack width, deflection values and the deformability of the tested beams.

Keywords

• high strength concrete
• stirrup
• single swimmer bar
• shear
• deflection