experimental and numerical investigation of replacing steel stirrups with frp rebars concrete in beams

today, corrosion in reinforcements is an important issue in many structures, especially those made in off-shore, resulting of reduction of the structural capacity under gravitational and lateral loads. using frp polymer can reduce this effect to some extents. a numerical and experimental investigation has been conducted on three different concrete beams to find out the effect of replacing steel stirrups with frp ones under static loading. so, three beams were tested under concentrated loading on the middle of the span. one of the three beams, as the reference had steel stirrups, while the other two contained in-place frp made stirrups. longitudinal steel reinforcements were used in all three specimens. also, two different beams with steel and frp stirrups were analyzed by finite element method in ansys. after calibration, two other groups of concrete beams were modeled and analyzed. the results demonstrated that frp stirrups had the better shear capacity performance compared to steel stirrups and the final strain in frp stirrups reached %0.8 which is two times of the value suggested by design code provisions.