Rubber concrete beams under the action of transverse bending

Bending elements made of rubber polymer concrete (rubcon), which was invented at the Department of Reinforced Concrete and Stone Constructions of the Voronezh Civil Engineering Institute, are a promising direction in the development of the construction industry for industrial buildings due to their high load-bearing capacity combined with universal resistance to aggressive environments. One of the primary building materials today is cement concrete, despite its disadvantages associated with the complexity of the maintenance of reinforced concrete structures in aggressive environments. The previous research on rubcon bending elements of the rectangular cross-section was carried out without implementing numerical studies that consider the nonlinear properties of the materials. Based on the conducted physical experiments, a deformation model of the resistance of the normal cross-sections to the action of transverse bending is developed, which allows estimating the strength of rubcon beams with the greatest deviation of 18%. The accepted prerequisites in the calculation model allow a more correct description of the deformation of polymer concrete in reinforced structures. The proposed analysis method is validated by numerical studies in the ANSYS® software. Due to the obtained excellent convergence with experimental values, physical studies can be replaced by numerical studies.