Experimental Investigation on Flexural and Torsional Failure in Reinforced Concrete Beams

Every year, earthquake threats lots of lives, leads to lots of failures, confronts governments with lots of costs and challenges structural and earthquake engineers all around the world. Iran as a potent place of earthquake experiences several quakes each year. Therefore, retrofitting of civil structures is essential worldwide, especially in Iran. No need to say, before starting the process of retrofitting structures either in design phase or construction, we need to evaluate them against different kinds of loading and observe their failure mechanisms. Due to the some operational difficulties in constructing the reinforced concrete structures, their behavior under loading is usually different from what it is supposed to be theoretically. Hence, it is important to experimentally test reinforced concrete samples in the laboratories and compare the experimental and analytical results. This paper presents experimental investigation on flexural failure in reinforced concrete beams.Also, Nowadays by increasing the number of complicated reinforced concrete structures and their intricate behavior especially against seismic loading, need for investigation of their behavior in pure torsion failure is strongly felt. Therefore, observing the behavior of reinforced concrete beams in pure torsion failure and comparing the experimental results with theoretical assumptions are another goal of this paper.

Keywords:

Retrofit , Flexural , Pure Torsion , Reinforced concrete