The corrosion behaviour of steel reinforcement is a major concern for modern reinforced concrete infrastructures. Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) reinforcement might be proposed as an alternate solution to this problem. This paper investigates the structural performance of FRP and steel reinforced concrete beams. The test results revealed that FRP reinforced beams showed parallel behaviour to those of steel reinforcement beams. Before cracking, all beams exhibited identical behaviour. However, after cracking the deflections of the beams increased with the decrease in the axial rigidity of the reinforcement. The flexural rigidity varies linearly with the axial rigidity of the reinforcement. Also, the normalized shear capacity of the beams was found to be linear with cubic root of the axial rigidity of the reinforcement. Consequently, it can be said that the FRP reinforcement might be used in lieu of steel reinforcement for infrastructures where corrosive behaviour is a concerned problem. © 2019 Institution of Engineering and Technology. All rights reserved.

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