Flexural behaviour of reinforced lightweight foamed mortar beams and slabs

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental results on flexural behaviour of reinforced concrete beams and slabs made of lightweight foamed mortar with density ranged from 1700 to 1800 kg/m3. Beam specimens consist of seven lightweight foamed mortar beams and three normal weight concrete beams acted as the control sample. Whereas, slab specimens contain two lightweight foamed mortar slabs and two normal weight concrete slabs. Four types of lightweight foamed mortar with different cement-sand ratios and water-cement ratios designated as LW-1, LW-2, LW-3 and LW-4 were produced in order to achieve targeted compressive strength of 20 MPa at 28 days for structural usage. The results showed that reinforced lightweight foamed mortar beams sustained about 8% to 34% lower ultimate load as compared to normal weight reinforced concrete with same reinforcement configuration. However, lightweight foamed mortar slab sustained higher ultimate load, averagely 18% as compared to normal weight slab. Apart from that, it was observed that the both reinforced lightweight foamed mortar beams and slabs were weak in resisting shear forces nonetheless flexural failure cannot be ignored entirely due to the presence of excessive yielding of the steel strain data.