Analysis of concrete beams reinforced with stainless steel

Stainless steel has been exploited widely in the construction industry and is used in a range of applications owing to its characteristics in terms of corrosion resistance, long life cycle, formability, durability and recyclability.The stress-strain behaviour of stainless steel is different from that of carbon steel.Carbon steel demonstrates linear-elastic behaviour with a clear yield point followed by plastic deformation with little strain hardening.On the other hand, stainless steel exhibits a more nonlinear yet continuous stress-strain response without a clearly defined yield point.Currently, the vast majority of global design standards, such as Eurocode 2, do not fully exploit the ductility and strain hardening characteristics of stainless steel in the plastic design of reinforced concrete structures.This assumption leads to very conservative capacity predictions since stainless steel exhibits a high degree of strain hardening.Therefore, the aim of this paper is to study the design of stainless steel reinforced concrete beams, and to investigate the impact that neglecting strain hardening has on the load-bearing capacity.Towards this end, a finite element model has been developed and validated using experimental data available in the literature and is described herein.Then, the model is used to investigate the behaviour of concrete beams with stainless steel reinforcement and to study the influence of the most salient parameters.