Behavior of masonry-infilled concrete beams

Natural disasters can cause the collapse of buildings, either the super- or substructures of the building. In addition to columns, beams that function as supports to floor slabs are also required to have reliable strengths. The reliability of the structure often has an impact on the high cost of construction. For this reason, the study was engineered to reduce the sectional area or volume of the beam without reducing its strength. The study involved a series of beam flexural bending tests which were infilled by the lightweight bricks and the red bricks into the mid-depth of the beams for which the beams were designed against the premature shear failure. The beams were then subjected to a monotonic static load with intervals of approximately 0.1 kN until they reached their flexural failures. The results showed that there were no significant differences between the beams infilled with either infill lightweight bricks (ILB) or infill red bricks (IRB) and the control beams (traditional concrete beams). However, when the ILB or IRB depth was increased, the flexural capacities of both ILB and IRB beams increased by approximately 24.12 percent against the control beam. The loadings of all the beam specimens were terminated when the concrete in compression started to crush.