STUDY AND BEHAVIOUR OF REINFORCED CONCRETE SPECIMENS UNDER VARIOUS ELEVATED TEMPERATURES

Concrete is a composite material composed of coarse aggregate, fine aggregate bonded together with fluid cement which hardens over time resulting in RC structures. However all the structures are prone to damage when exposed to relatively high temperatures to that of the atmospheric temperature. Current scenarios show us that due to the development in technology, human carelessness has increased. Being completely reliant on technology even for safety purposes may lead to undesirable accidents, one of which is fire accidents in buildings. Reinforced concrete may be a very hard and durable material, but it has its own threshold points. After which the concrete disintegrates with the rise in temperature. As the temperature increases to a considerable extent, say 500℃, concrete eventually starts losing its integrity and stiffness. In this project RC short columns are to be studied in specific because columns are the most important and critical members of any structure. That too, in most of the cases, we ought to use only short columns in our construction. Hence studying their behaviour when exposed to various elevated temperatures may help us in knowing about its effects and also helps us in improving the design strategies against fire outbreaks in RC structures. Here, conventional concrete specimen like 15 cubes and 15 cylinders of grade M30 were casted and heated to various elevated temperatures like 500℃ ,600℃ ,700℃ ,800℃in the heating oven and then tested. The test results gave us the compressive strength, split tensile strength and Young's modulus values which will be very helpful in developing the heat resistant design strategies.