The majority of Civil engineering researches related to beam-column joints are focused on the retrofit and the design of buildings. Numerous provisions to enhance the joint performance of buildings have been recommended. In bridges, member size, reinforcement size and amount are quite large. Also joint geometries and loading conditions in bridges are different compared to that in buildings, due to which the provisions proposed for building beam-column joints may not be appropriate for bridge beam-column joints. Moreover, the dense reinforcement in beams and columns of bridges causes congestion at the beam-column joint resulting in poor workability and poor performance of joints during earthquakes.
In Japan, a large number of bridges have been constructed as a moment resisting frames with intermediate link beams which forms T-joints at junction of beam and column. This paper deals with the experimental study on a beam-column joint of bridges. The research primarily focuses on reducing steel reinforcement in beam-column joint by investigating the failure mechanism, crack patterns and lateral load carrying capacity of beam-column joints with and without steel fibers. For this purpose, one-sixth scale reinforced concrete specimen based on the existing bridges in Japan was prepared. Further, other specimens with reduced steel reinforcements with and without steel fibers were also constructed. All the specimens were tested under displacement controlled quasi-static cyclic loading. The performances of specimen were expressed in terms of load-displacement relationship, strain-displacement relationship and crack pattern.