Occasionally it is more crucial to lower the mass of a building component than to improve its rigidity, specifically in massive buildings like long-span structures where the self-weight of the floors is one of the significant challenges that engineers confront. Therefore, the main objective of this work is to explore the flexural performance of Lightweight Concrete Beams (LWCBs) reinforced with Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) bars in terms of curvature, cracks and failure modes, deflection, material stress-strain relationship, and joint end rotation. The flexural performance of LWCBs reinforced with varied GFRP bars and Steel Reinforcement (SR) ratios is assessed and compared to that of Normal Concrete Beams (NCBs) reinforced with SR. Numerical analytical models for the tested beams were created utilizing the iDiana software. Both analytical and experimental test results were compared. The study revealed a high correlation between the findings of Finite Element Models (FEMs) and those acquired from beam testing. The performance of LWCBs that utilized SR was equivalent to that of NCBs. The GFRP-reinforced LWCBs performed mostly as elastic deformed elements, with just little deflection post-load release. The study emphasized the significant potential for employing LWC and GFRP bars in the construction field's growth.
9 April 2018 in Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering
Up-to-date detection of a building's responses under various load situations is essential to generate data used to assess its capacity to bear crucial loads. This study presents an innovative and effective method to detect structural displacements and provide a more accurate alternative to existing approaches such as trigonometry leveling and angle intersecting. The least squares method was used to produce a concurrent solution that includes all the observed data to improve precision and retrieve the data needed for statistical analysis. The proposed method was validated experimentally and compared with the total station, conventional structural analysis, and displacement gauges to test and monitor a three-point loaded Reinforced Concrete (RC) beam at seven discrete points. The displacement gauge measurements were used as a baseline for comparing the outcomes from the other methods. The maximum mid-span deflection of the tested RC beam showed that the variation between the recorded displacement using displacement gauges and the suggested approach was below 0.31mm, resulting in a 3.7% inaccuracy, while the total station observations and the ACI-Code deflection provisions provided deflections of 0.62 and 3.64mm, resulting in 7.4% and 43.4% inaccuracies, respectively. Furthermore, comparing the results using root-mean-square error, the suggested method's precision in detecting displacements was much superior to the total station. The proposed approach was effective for detecting horizontal and vertical deformations and offers a viable option for building monitoring across both the element and whole building stages.