Strength of reinforced concrete T-beams

Studies on the shear strength of reinforced concrete beams carried outin the past, dealt mainly with rectangular beams. However, there iscomparatively little information on the shear strength of T -beams, despitethe fact that in practice, beams are likely to be of this type. Most codes ofpractice treats the T -beams in resisting the shear as rectangular beamshaving a width equal to the web width of the flanged section ignoring thecontribution of the flange, whether this flange is positioned in thecompression side or in the tension side of the beam.In this thesis, the behaviour and strength of the reinforced concrete T-beams, the contribution of the flange either in compression or in tensionside of the beam, the effect of different factors on such beams in shear areexperimentally and numerically investigated.The experimental program consists of thirty two reinforced concrete T-beams, eleven of them are compression flanged beams, to determine theeffect of the positive moment on the behaviour of T -beams, and twentyone of them are tension flanged beams, to determine the effect of thenegative moment on the behaviour of such beams in shear.All the tested beams were simply supported and subjected to two equalconcentrated loads at equal shear spans.The numerical program was mainly executed to study the behaviour ofthe reinforced concrete T -beams in shear until failure occurred, using non-linear three - dimensional finite element analysis over a large number of