The tension stiffening stress-strain relationship of concrete in tension, newly developed test methods and implementation

Research on the compression behavior of concrete has been widely carried out, on the other hand, information about the behavior of concrete in tension was limited. The existing concrete tension tests are the splitting, direct tensile, and rupture tests. These methods provide information on the tensile strength of concrete through concrete tension stiffening tests. This paper aims to elaborate on the experimental study to develop and construct the equation of concrete tensile strength based on the tension stiffening effect mechanism. The basic principle of this newly proposed method was the composite action between steel and concrete. The straight and continuous steel bar was embedded in concrete to ensure no eccentricity that could interfere with research data due to the bending moment. 45 Specimens made from cylinder concrete with 101.6 mm diameter and 450 mm length, steel bar embedded at the center of the section. Three concrete mixes with actual compressive strength of 31.66 MPa, 40.27 MPa, and 46.60 MPa and steel bar diameters of 15.9 mm, 18.7 mm, and 21.7 mm were used as variables. The test was performed by applying an incremental tensile loading at both ends of the steel specimen with a load rate of 5-10 kN/minute to obtain a force-displacement relationship. The curve must be lessened with steel bar response to get the load-displacement of tension concrete, and then by dividing load with concrete area and displacement with the length of both LVDT can be generated stress-strain of tension concrete. This study shows that the tension-stiffening effect is affected by the reinforcement ratio. Where the reinforcement ratio increases, the tension-stiffening decreases. The steel bar to concrete-area ratio higher tends to more cracks. The concrete tensile strength of this research is taken from the stress of the first crack indicates very close to the direct tensile test but slightly higher.