Structural behavior of RC beams strengthened with UHPFRC layers incorporating a new tension stiffening factor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated experimentally and analytically the performance of reinforced concrete (RC) beams strengthened with reinforced ultra-high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete (R-UHPFRC) layers at both ultimate and service limit states. Four large-scale beams were tested: one unstrengthened and three strengthened with R-UHPFRC layers incorporating different fiber configurations (2 % steel fibers, 2 % ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMW-PE) fibers, and a hybrid of 1 % steel + 1 % UHMW-PE fibers). Digital image correlation (DIC) was employed to monitor curvature, crack width, and crack propagation. The beam with 2 % UHMW-PE fibers demonstrated a 47 % gain in ductility and a 112 % increase in strength, while the beam with 2 % steel fibers achieved improvements of 34 % and 137 %, respectively. The beam with hybrid fibers experienced premature cover delamination. All strengthened beams exhibited substantial reductions in the average crack width at service loads (15–38 µm) compared with the control (330 µm). To capture the contribution of the R-UHPFRC layer, Bischoff’s tension stiffening factor was modified using DIC-derived data, and a simplified equation was proposed to predict average crack width. The revised factor accurately reproduced both load–deflection responses and crack widths under service conditions, confirming the validity of the proposed modification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".