Flexural shear behaviour of reinforced crumbed rubber concrete beam

This paper investigates the flexural shear behaviour of reinforced beams made from different Crumbed Rubber Concrete (CRC) mixes having similar compressive strength and different proportions of crumbed rubber. As part of the study concrete beam specimens, made from six different CRC mixes, were prepared and tested to failure under flexural load. For each mix, one beam with a large amount of shear reinforcement and another one without any shear reinforcements were used to distinguish between their bending and shear failure behaviour clearly. The experimental results allowed the comparison between the shear failure behaviour of beams with different CRC mixes. The measured shear capacities were used to examine the applicability and accuracy of available design guidelines for conventional concrete on predicting the shear capacity of reinforced CRC beams. The experimental results were also used to determine the adequacy of existing conventional concrete material models to numerically simulate the shear behaviour of CRC beams using finite element analysis.