High Strength Reinforced Concrete Beams with Exposed Main Steel

As part of our longstanding experimental and theoretical works on maintenance and repair of concrete structures, this paper addresses some aspects of the most common repair technique in which, in the course of applying the repair materials, the concrete cover and steel-concrete bond over certain (shear dominated) regions of the damaged simply supported reinforced concrete (RC) beams are removed prior to the application of the repair material. In particular, much emphasis will be placed on verifying a previously reported simple (hand-based) lower bound predictive model (by Raoof and Senussi) for RC beams made of normal strength concrete, with exposure of main steel located within the shear dominated regions, when dealing with RC beams made of high strength concrete. To this end, use will be made of some recently obtained large scale test results by the present authors, which cover concrete cube compressive strengths of up to 110 MPa.