Comparative Performance Analysis of Small Concrete Beams Reinforced with Steel Bars and Non-Metallic Reinforcements

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This study analyzed the performance of concrete beams reinforced with steel bar and non-metallic reinforcements. Overall, the manuscript is well written, and it is a good case study. I therefore recommend to accept this manuscript after a minor revision. To improve its quality, I suggest to add more quantitively analysis on the two different beams. Moreover, more design theory and suggestions should be proposed based on the experimental results. Otherwise, the whole manuscript is more like a technical report rather than an academic paper. Finally, Fig. 7 seems redundant as the existence of Fig. 8.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, the answers are in the files.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Corrosion of reinforcing steel is the main factor causing the degradation of reinforced concrete structures. The durability of reinforced concrete structures is especially important for industrial facilities that may be exposed to adverse environmental conditions. The use of non-metallic reinforcement as the main reinforcement of concrete elements is one of the ways to eliminate corrosion and thereby extend the service life of structures. Fiberglass rods are lightweight, corrosion resistant and have high tensile strength. But at the same time, the Young's modulus of composite bars is approximately five times lower than that of steel reinforcement, which leads to a much greater reduction in the cross-sectional stiffness of a GFRP-reinforced beam after cracking compared to a reinforced concrete beam. The study submitted for review focused on concrete beams reinforced with two types of glass fiber reinforced plastics, namely glass fiber reinforced polymer and basalt fiber reinforced polymer. And a comparison of such beams with beams reinforced with traditional steel rods (steel reinforcement). Through this comparative approach, the study aims to holistically understand the material properties inherent in each type of reinforcement and to identify possible vulnerabilities in fiber reinforced polymers. The article is interesting, well organized and its results can have practical application.

There are several comments to the manuscript.

1.The article examines beams of small sizes. Can the results obtained in this study be applied to full-size structural beams?

2.In your work, you examined concrete beams by loading them to failure. What failure criterion did you use and how did you record the moment when the failure occurred? Is this criterion the same for all types of beams under study?

3.More recently, you have published several good publications on the topic of the presented research, for example: (Krassowska, J. Flexural Capacity of Concrete Beams with Basalt Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Bars and Stirrups. Materials 2022, 15, 8270. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15228270 ; Krassowska, J.Testing the Influence of Metakaolinite and Zeolite on the Adhesion of BFRP and GFRP Bars to Concrete. Materials 2023, 16, 7435. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma16237435).I believe that they need to be mentioned in the text of the article, showing the process of development of the topic raised.

4.What is the procedure for constructing the graphs in Fig. 5? Did you draw the graph presented in Figure 5 hypothetically, using the deflection value in the middle of the beam and knowing the theoretical structure of the graph? Or did you take measurements of beam deflections at many points and you got exactly these experimental graphs? This probably needs to be said in the text of the article.

5.In terms of strength, BFRP beams can easily withstand a load of 20kN. But at the same time, the maximum deflection of such beams is more than 10 mm (with a beam length of less than one meter). Satisfying the stiffness condition for such beams is likely to be a problem. Is the permissible deflection (normative deflection) the same for beams with metal and non-metallic reinforcement?

6.In section "4. Conclusion" the authors well described the qualitative results of the study. But I would also like to see quantitative results in this section. Also in this section it is necessary to mention the limitations of the results obtained and the specific future directions for the development of the topic raised.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, the answers are in the files.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx