Different techniques were employed for the passage of different utilities through structural elements. The reduction of the overall building weight was the main concern that needs to be achieved, especially for a multistory building. It can be done with the eliminating of a suspended ceiling with a portion of the beam’s weight by taking the advantages of the hollow sections. In this study, an equivalent reinforcement to the traditional ribbed reinforcement was employed to fabricate a reinforced concrete (RC) beam with a hollow section along the length of the beam. A steel pipe was used based on the equivalent moment from section analysis. Two diameters were selected of steel pipes as an equivalent to the commercial reinforcement. A total of four RC beams were cast and tested, two of them with traditional reinforcement and the other with steel pipe reinforcement. The comparison showed a promising result in terms of ductility, cracking pattern, ultimate strength, and mode of failure compared to the reference beam. The peak loads for the specimens with steel pipe were 160.6 kN and 184 kN, while they were 192 kN and 203.5 kN for the beams with traditional reinforcement.
Experimental investigations on concrete beams reinforced with equivalent service steel pipe
