Experimental Study on Fire Performance of Loaded Reinforced Concrete Beams

Abstract

The performance of reinforced concrete (RC) beams under simultaneous fire and structure loading conditions is presented in this paper. Four RC beams were tested under different configurations viz. two control beams and two beams under fire conditions. The test program includes a series of four experiments on normal and high strength concrete beams. To study the flexural behaviour of RC beams, two reference specimens of different grades (M30 and M60) were tested under four point loading test. In the tests, observations for first cracking load, ultimate load, deflections and fire resistance were monitored. Data from test is utilized to compute performance of normal and high strength concrete beams. Measured temperature and deflection were compared as a function of fire exposure time. Results from the test infer that concrete beams made of normal strength concrete possess higher fire resistance as compared to high strength concrete beams