Assessing the shear behavior of steel fiber reinforced concrete beams corroded under chloride attacks

Abstract

Steel corrosion affects the failure mechanism of deteriorated reinforced concrete (RC) beams. Meanwhile, there is a lack of research on the shear behavior of corroded RC beams, particularly corroded steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) beams. This paper investigates the shear behavior of corroded SFRC beams with a 1.5 shear span-to-depth ratio. All beam specimens included steel fibers with 50 kg/m³. In particular, tensile longitudinal reinforcements were subjected to a corrosion degree of 16.4%, while stirrups were subjected to an approximately 24.1% corrosion degree. These results are compared to those obtained on a non-corroded beam. The obtained results from the four-point loading tests show that the corroded SFRC beams preserve a softening behavior as opposed to the sudden shear failure of RC beams without steel fibers.