Investigation of the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete beams strengthened with a composite reinforcement layer: Polyvinyl alcohol fiber‐reinforced ferrocement cementitious composite and steel wire mesh

Abstract

To improve the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) beams, a new ferrocement composite material was proposed. A polyvinyl alcohol fiberreinforced ferrocement cementitious composite (PVA-RFCC) and steel wire mesh (SWM) were attached onto the soffit of the RC beams as a composite reinforcement layer (CRL). One control beam and four strengthened RC beams were investigated. The maximum load carrying capacity, initial stiffness, and displacement ductility parameter of the strengthened beams were up to 99.3%, 48.0%, and 90.9% higher than those of the control beam, respectively. The SWM2 accounted for 91.6% of these improvements. An analytical model was proposed to predict the flexural capacity of strengthened RC beams. The tensile force of the polyvinyl alcohol-engineered cementitious composite was considered and calculated by rectangular and triangular distributions. The predicted results were in good agreement with the experimental results, which validated the accuracy of the proposed model.