ABSTRACT

Continuous rise in the prices of steel reinforcement and cement leads to the search for ways to
reduce the weight of the concrete. This reflects on the total cost of the construction project. This
also has a significant effect on environmental problems caused by use of huge amounts of
cement and steel.In RC beams strength of concrete lying in and near neutral axis is not fully
utilised and hence this unutilized concrete can be removed by replacing with any light weight
material. The idea of providing hollow section to the beam by incoporating PVC pipe in order to
reduce the weight of the structure was generally one of the solutions for lightweight beam
structure. The concept introduced was the same as hollow slab panels which been widely used
in bridge and highway construction. To check the suitability of such beam structures an
experimental testing was conducted to indentify the flexural strength, defelction profile and
crack pattern of the hollow beam samples. 6 Beams of dimension (200*300*2300)mm were
sampled with 2 samples being solid beam with no hollow section while the remaining were
beams with longitudinal circular hollow section below neutral axis at variable depths. The beam
samples were tested under gradually increasing 2 point loading and linear variable displacement
transducer (LVDT) were used to measure the deflection of the samples. then the results were
compared and effects were studied thoroughly.