Effect of steel content on strength and ductility of singly reinforced RC beam sections

Even though pure singly RC sections are never used in practice, because for constructive reasons at least two bars must be added at compressive zone of the section, in this paper singly reinforced section is used in order to point out the impact of steel content on strength and ductility of RC beam sections. The lower limit of steel content is dictated by ultimate steel strain, while the upper limit is the content which corresponds to balanced failure condition, i.e. the condition where the crushing of concrete occurs at the same time when steel yield strength is reached. Because trial-and-adjustment technique was to be used and several analysis with small increments were to be carried out, a small program was developed in Microsoft Excel in order to reduce computational efforts. At the end, the results were presented through the graphs and tables, where an optimum steel content was found for this particular case analyzed