Torsional behavior of reinforced concrete beams with corroded reinforcement

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the pure torsional moment capacities of corroded reinforcedconcrete beams. An accelerated corrosion pool was used to corrode the reinforcement bars embedded in re-inforced concrete beams. Seven reinforced concrete beams at corrosion levels between 0% and 17% were ex-amined under pure torsion tests. The actual corrosion levels were obtained by breaking the concrete and ex-tracting the reinforcement bars from the concrete after the torsion tests. An empirical model was developed topredict the pure torsional moment capacities of the reinforced concrete beams as a function of the corrosionlevel. The experimental results showed that, compared to the cracking torque, the maximum torques and dis-sipated energy capacities of the corroded reinforced concrete beams were significantly reduced as the corrosionlevel increased. Nonuniform shear flow originating from the nonuniform formations due to corrosion throughthe depth of the diaphragm produced different cracking patterns. The failure modes of the corroded reinforcedconcrete beams were more severe if the diagonal compression struts were joined with bond cracking.