Long-term flexural behaviour of reinforced baked clay beams

Clay is a low cost and environment-friendly material for construction. On firing, it gets hard and attains compressive strength as high as normal concrete. This paper presents the flexural behaviour of singly reinforced baked clay beams under long- term sustained loads. The loads applied at midspan of these beams were 30%, 40%, and 50% of their short-term failure load for a period of 360 days. The results show that the rate of deflection, formation of cracks, and their stabilization was completed in a certain period of time depending on the intensity of the long-term sustained loads. In the first and second loading conditions, this period of opening and stabilization of cracks was 100 and 77 days, respectively. Then, the deflection increased with a decreasing rate. Vhile in the case of 50% of loading condition, the period of formation and stabilization of cracks was reduced to only 50 days, and then these cracks became dormant and no new crack was developed with respect to time. After that, negligible midspan deflection was observed with time. In addition to this, the deflection in these beams was more compared to the estimated long-term deflection according to ACI code.