Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Corbels Containing Steel Fibers Under Eccentric Vertical Loading – Experimental and Numerical Investigation

This research investigates the torsional resistance of reinforced concrete double corbels and the effect of eccentricity of load and variation of vertical and horizontal stirrups on the structural behavior. An experimental program was conducted where nine reinforced concrete (RC) double corbels containing steel fibers having different widths and different percentage of vertical and horizontal stirrups were cast and tested under centric and eccentric static vertical load until failure. Experimental results regarding first crack load, ultimate load, displacement, twisting angle and crack pattern are presented and discussed. The experimental results showed that increasing the vertical stirrups and horizontal stirrups increased the ultimate torque of the tested specimens between 4.58% to 17.96% while increasing corbel width increased the ultimate torque by 24.32%. Numerical modeling and nonlinear analysis by finite elements were performed for the experimentally tested specimens using ANSYS v.18 commercial software. The obtained numerical results were in close agreement with the experimental results regarding load-displacement response, crack patterns, failure loads and failure modes which demonstrates the validity and efficiency of the adopted numerical model.