Influence of superficial treatment of reinforcing bars on service performance of reinforced concrete beams submitted to bending

Abstract

The application of epoxi coatings or corrosion inhibitors on reinforcing bars, as an intervention technique to guarantee the durability of structures, may create bond problems between steel and concrete. If these bond losses happen, they corerspond with an increase of the average crack spacing and average crack width. Nevertheless, it may be deduced that the average steel strain doesn't experiment significant variations, which justifies that sometimes, on service conditions, the modification of the steel bond properties doesn't influence on the deformation of bending structural elements. Moreover, it may be observed that with the modifications introduced in the deflection calculation by the EH-91 with regard to EH-88, we get appropiate predictions of the total and active deflection experimentally registered when the acting moment is much greater than the cracking moment.