Deflection of Reinforced Concrete Beam under Low-Velocity Impact Loads

Accidents due to low-velocity impact loading are no longer uncommon these days. Accordingly, although evaluation criteria for regulating the global behavior of major structures are required to ensure sufficient impact resistance, to date the criteria have not been specified. Although several studies have suggested empirical formulae for evaluating the deflection of reinforced concrete (RC) beams from drop weight impact tests, the derivation of these formulae suffer limited impact energy ranges and few investigated parameters. To overcome these limitations, 15 RC beams were tested in this study under drop weight impact loading with five variables: impact energy, drop weight momentum, static flexural capacity, cross-section size, and concrete strength. The limitations of the previous studies were experimentally verified, and an empirical formula was newly proposed based on the test results. Furthermore, the validity of both the experimental results and our new empirical formula was analytically verified through parametric studies.