Performance of a novel bent-up bars system not interacting with concrete

Increasing the bending and shear capacities of reinforced concrete members is an interesting issue in structural engineering. In recent years, many studies have been carried out to improve capacities of reinforced concrete members such as using post and pre-tensioning, Fiber Reinforced Polymer and other techniques. This paper proposes a novel and significant technique to increase the flexural capacity of simply supported reinforced concrete beams. The proposed method uses a new reinforcement bar system having bent-up bars, covered with rubber tubes. This technique will avoid interaction of bent-up bars with concrete. They are located in the zone where compressive and tensile forces act against one another. The compressive force in the upper point of the bent-up bars is exerted to the end point of these bars located under neutral axis. Moreover, the tensile stress is decreased in reinforcements located under the neutral axis. This will cause the Reinforced Concrete (RC) beam to endure extra loading before reaching yield stress. These factors may well be considered as reasons to increase bending capacity in the new system. The laboratory work together with finite element method analysis were carried out in this investigation. Furthermore, bending capacity, ductility, strength, and cracking zone were assessed for the new proposed system and compared with the conventional model. Both the FEM simulation and the experimental test results revealed that the proposed system has significant impact in increasing the load bearing capacity and the stiffness of the RC beams. In the present study, an equation is formulated to calculate bending capacity of a new reinforcement bar system beam.