Reinforced Concrete Design with Stainless Steel

In the design of reinforced concrete structures, the bond property is crucial. This is important for achieving the composite action between the two materials constituents, allowing loads to be efficiently transmitted. The higher strain hardening and ductility capacity of stainless steel over mild steel are one of its major benefits. International design codes, such as Eurocode 2, do not provide a separate design model for concrete structures with stainless reinforcing bars. The background paper to Eurocode 2 highlighted that there is no technical reason of why the Eurocode 2 design model cannot be used in conjunction with other types of reinforcement, provided allowance is made for their properties and behaviour. While this notion is valid when using a mild steel reinforcing bar, it produces erroneous results when a stainless reinforcing bar with a lap splice is used in a reinforced concrete section. Even though there has been a large number of studies on the behaviour of structure with stainless steel in recent years, most of it has been on plain stainless-steel members rather than reinforced concrete or stainless-steel reinforced concrete with lap splice. As a result, the purpose of this chapter is to evaluate and compare the behaviour of stainless and mild steel reinforced concrete with and without lap splices.