DIYALA JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING SCIENCES

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation on the behavior of bubbled wide reinforced concrete beams with different shear steel plate spacing. Four specimens with the dimensions of 215x560x1800mm are investigated. The variables studied in this work is using the 10mm stirrups with 125mm spacing and 3mm thickness steel plate with spacing 125, 166 and 250mm instead of reinforcing stirrups. Shear steel plates is good alternative for replacing the stirrups and gives increasing in yield and ultimate loads with 17% and 18% respectively and decreasing the deflection by 8% at yield and 12% at ultimate. Moreover decrease the strain in longitudinal reinforcement by 8% at yield and 24% at ultimate, and reduced the total weight by 2.7%. By increasing the spacing of shear steel plate by 33% and 100%, the results showed that the yield load reduced to 3% and 4% respectively, but the deflection was increased with 37% and 20% (at yield). The strain in interior legs is more than the strain in exterior legs by 189%, 142% and 52% at yield for spacing 125, 166 and 250mm respectively. ACI 318-14 [1] and EC 2 [2] codes give a predicted deflection more than the experimental deflection by 26% and 30% on average respectively.