Experimental Study on the Possibility of Using Steel Fiber-Reinforced Concrete to Reduce Conventional Rebars in Beam-Column Joints

In rigid-framed railway bridges, because of excessive amounts of rebar in beams and columns, overcongestion at the beam-column joints of rigid-framed railway bridges was investigated in this paper. The experiments were conducted on eight one-sixth scaled specimens that include four T-joint and four knee-joint specimens. In the control specimens, the amount of steel rebars and their arrangements and detailings resembled the as-built configuration of the rigid-framed railway bridge in Japan. In the other specimens, the amount of steel rebars was reduced and steel fibers were varied as 0, 1.0, and 1.5% by volume. The experimental results of the specimens were compared in terms of crack patterns, load-displacement relationships, ductility, energy dissipation capacity, and stiffness degradation and found that the performance of the control specimens and specimens with 1.5% of steel fibers and reduced steel rebars was comparable. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)MT.1943-5533.0000536. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.