Predicting the bond between concrete and reinforcing steel at elevated temperatures

Reinforced concrete structures are vulnerable to high temperature conditions such as those during a fire. At elevated temperatures, the mechanical properties of concrete and reinforcing steel as well as the bond between steel rebar and concrete may significantly deteriorate. The changes in the bonding behavior may influence the flexibility or the moment capacity of the reinforced concrete structures. The bond strength degradation is required for structural design of fire safety and structural repair after fire. However, the investigation of bonding between rebar and concrete at elevated temperatures is quite difficult in practice. In this study, bond constitutive relationships are developed for normal and high-strength concrete (NSC and HSC) subjected to fire, with the intention of providing efficient modeling and to specify the fire-performance criteria for concrete structures exposed to fire. They are developed for the following purposes at high temperatures: normal and high compressive strength with different type of aggregates, bond strength with different types of embedment length and cooling regimes, bond strength versus to compressive strength with different types of embedment length, and bond stress-slip curve. The proposed relationships at elevated temperature are compared with experimental results.