Energy dissipation characteristics of steel fibre reinforced concrete beams under cyclic flexural loading

A series of laboratory tests have been conducted to investigate the energy dissipation characterstics of SFRC beams under cyclic flexural loading. A total of seventy two SFRC beams of span 500mm and cross-section of 100mm x 100mm having two aspect ratios of 60 and 100 and three percentages of 0.5, 1.0 and 1.5 of steel fibres were tested. The loops of load-deflection hysterisis obtained from cyclic loading tests were used to determine the energy dissipation characteristics of SFRC beams. The variation of envelope deflection, common point deflection and stability point deflection with plastic deflection have been plotted. A polynomial formulation is proposed for the relations between energy dissipation ratio versus envelope deflection and energy dissipation ratio versus plastic deflection. These relations indicate that the decay of strength of beams start at about 0.72 and 0.75 times of peak load for specimens with aspect ratios of 60 and 100 respectively.