Analytical and experimental study on reinforced concrete arch by photoelasticity technique: Fid-Bau Portal

Analytical and experimental study on reinforced concrete arch by photoelasticity technique

Parthasarathi, N. / Srinivasa Senthil, S. / Prakash, M. / Satyanarayanan, K. S.

Abstract Today the provision of arches has become a very common technique to give the structure stability as well as increasing its beauty, an arch is a curved structure that spans a space and may or may not support weight it is a pure compression form and eliminates the tensile stresses. But the analytical methods implied for determining the stress in the arch can become very complicated hence chances of error may occur which could lead the structure to fail. Hence, to overcome this problem an experimental technique called photoelasticity can be used for analyzing the stresses in the arches. Photoelasticity is a method to determine the stress distribution in a material experimentally; the method is used where the analytical calculations become cumbersome, this technique is based on the property of fire fringes which is the phenomena in which a ray of light passing through a given material experiences two refractive index. The refractive indices at each point of the material are directly related to the state stresses at that point so building a model of arch using photoelastic material (acrylic sheet) which has a geometry similar to the real structure is under investigation. In this study the reinforced concrete arches with different span and central rise and to check the load acting on arches and to compare the stress pattern between different reinforced concrete arches using photoelasticity is subjected to compressive stress.