Shear behavior of reinforced concrete beams with wire rope shear reinforcement

The use of high-strength and highly flexible wire ropes as internal shear reinforcement may be a solution to reduce the congestion of steel reinforcements and facilitate their installation in reinforced concrete (RC) elements. This paper aims to study the effectiveness of continuous wire ropes in substituting traditional shear reinforcement and its effect on the RC beam’s shear behavior. Four-point bending tests were performed on 32 beam specimens. Fourteen different configurations of shear reinforcement were tested, of which four were reinforced in a conventional manner and ten with wire ropes. Deflection and crack opening were measured using Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technique. Test results show that the experimental shear capacities of beams with wire ropes are in good agreement with the estimated theoretical values. The difference in behavior of the two types of beams—transversely reinforced with wire ropes or traditional steel rebars—occurs at the appearance of the first diagonal crack. A progressive evolution of the crack opening occurs when using traditional rebars, while a sudden crack opening accompanied by loss of shear strength occurs in beams reinforced with wire ropes. This sudden loss is repeated several times during the test before reaching the final failure drop. The conjunction of two phenomena may be at the origin of this difference in the beam behavior: the smooth stiffness of the wire rope under tensile stresses associated with a weak wire rope-concrete bond.