SHEAR RESISTANCE OF OIL PALM SHELL REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS CAST WITH SHEAR REINFORCEMENT

Research on the use of Oil Palm Shell (OPS) to replace coarse aggregates in concrete to date has been focusing on the material properties of oil palm shell concrete (OPSC). So far, there has been a very limited amount of work conducted to investigate the shear performance of the OPSC beams indicating similar shear strength to that of normal-weight concrete (NWC) beams. This study investigates the shear failure mechanism of OPSC beams cast with shear reinforcement. The test results recorded from 11 OPSC beams and 5 NWC beams, simply supported with two-point loads, are presented. The variables considered include the concrete compressive strength, flexural reinforcement, shear-span, and shear-link spacing. The observed shear failure mechanism of OPSC beams was found to be similar to that of an NWC beam while the shear crack formation and shear resistance of OPSC beams are slightly higher (3% to 14%) and (4.2% to 8.5%), respectively. Comparative studies using the current provisions of EC2 and BS8110 have been performed and found that both codes' predictions, show good agreement with only a slight overestimation (VTest/VBS of 0.988) on the shear resistance, were consistent with the tests.