MCRJ Special Issue Vol. 6 | No. 1 | 2019 193 COMPARISON OF BIAXIAL TENSILE BEHAVIOUR OF PLAIN AND STEEL FIBRE REINFORCED CONCRETE (SFRC) WITH DIFFERENT TESTING TECHNIQUES Chiew Shing Mei 1 , Izni Syahrizal bin Ibrahim 1 , Noor Nabilah binti Sarbini 1 , Roslli Noor Mohamed 2 and Norwati binti Jamaluddin 3 1 Forensic Engineering Centre (FEC), Institute for Smart Infrastructure & Innovative Construction (ISIIC), School of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. 2 School of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. 3 Faculty of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, 86400 Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia. Abstract Most concrete biaxial behaviour investigations are focused on biaxial compression due to the complexity of biaxial test set up. This paper is aimed to construct a simple and economic biaxial testing frame for conducting a biaxial tensile test on plain concrete and steel fibre reinforced concrete (SFRC). It is also aimed to compare the biaxial tensile behaviour of the current study with the previous research by using different testing techniques under an equal stress ratio. Lever arm principle is applied in the proposed biaxial test set up. For SFRC, hooked-end type steel fibre with fibre volumetric fractions 0%, 0.5%, 1.0% and 1.5% are used. Uniaxial tensile strength of plain concrete is greater than biaxial tensile strength in SFRC. For plain concrete, the opposite result is obtained. The biaxial tensile strength is insignificantly affected by the increment of fibre volumetric fraction but the post-cracking behaviour of concrete is enhanced with the inclusion of steel fibre, which is in agreement with previous findings. The comparison shows that the proposed biaxial testing technique proposed is suitable to conduct biaxial tensile test. Keywords: Biaxial tension; Behaviour; Plain concrete; SFRC; Testing techniques INTRODUCTION Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) is introduced since the 19 th century due to its efficiency in crack bridging and ability to enhance the toughness of concrete structure. With the addition of steel fibre, concrete structures experience a more ductile failure than the catastrophic failure in normal concrete. In recent years, research on multiaxial loadings of concrete structures are gaining attention because most of the concrete structures experience multiaxial loading, such as beam-column connections, bridge decks, silos, and tunnel linings. Therefore, multiaxial loading should consider both ultimate limit state (ULS) and serviceability limit state (SLS) in the design instead of considering uniaxial loading alone (Lemnitzer et al., 2008). Multiaxial loading can be classified into three conditions, which are biaxial compression, biaxial tension-compression and biaxial tension. From previous research, experimental data for plain concrete and SFRC are commonly available for biaxial compression and biaxial tension-compression. However, experimental data on biaxial tension of plain concrete and SFRC are very scarce. This is because the multiaxial testing setup is difficult and complex, especially for Fibre Reinforced Concrete (FRC) (Sirijaroonchai et al., 2010). Click to buy NOW! P D F - X C h a n g e P r o d u c t w w w . t r a c ke r - s o f t w a r e . c o m Click to buy NOW! P D F - X C h a n g e P r o d u c t w w w . t r a c ke r - s o f t w a r e . c o m