Plastic rotation and tension stiffening effect analysis in reinforced concrete beams using photogrammetry

Resumen

Innovative procedures have been proposed recently for monitoring experimental tests using photogrammetry and image processing. This manuscript aims at providing a practical demonstration of the advantages of using these new techniques in tests up to failure. In this scope, the focus is given to the curvature, rotation and to the assessment of the concrete contribution between cracks to increase the bending stiffness, the tension stiffening effect. These parameters are crucial to describing the structural behavior of reinforced concrete beams both in service conditions and in ultimate limit states. These new techniques allow monitoring a high number of points, complement the traditional methods of monitoring and enable determining information impossible to obtain using the traditional methods. In this work the photogrammetry and image processing are used to evaluate: i) the detailed evolution of the curvature along the beam axis; ii) the tension stiffening effect; and iii) the plastic rotation for a certain beam length.