Ductile behavior of reinforced concrete beam incorporated with basalt fiber

The efficacies of micro basalt fiber positively influence the ductile nature of concrete along with its strength. In this regard, this research is intently focusing on improvising the deflection ductility and energy ductility of a reinforced concrete beam with the incorporation of basalt fiber. The experimental investigation is performed for the basalt fiber-reinforced concrete beams with the gradual increment of static load under simply supported boundary conditions. Load-Deflection enhancement of basalt fiber-reinforced concrete beam resulted in high ductility factor, high stiffness, and high energy absorption capacity. The maximum strain of the reinforced concrete beams is augmented due to the binding and bridging action of micro basalt fiber. Additionally, the numerical investigation is conducted to validate the experimental results, and also the ANSYS beam model has the capability to simulate the exclusive numerical parameters like deformed shape, stress contour, strain contour, crack, and crushing pattern. Both the investigation is eventually showing the improvement of toughness in the basalt fiber-reinforced concrete beam due to the effective dispersion, bonding, and bridging action of fiber. Due to this, the deflection ductile ratio and energy ductile ratio of basalt fiber-reinforced concrete beam is increased and exhibits predominant characteristics in the flexural members. Moreover, the correlation of experimental and numerical results falls within marginal deviation, having less than 10% of the difference in all cases of results.