Investigation of Tensile Strength of Welded Splices of Steel Bars

Due to the increasing need to use rebar in construction, many efforts have been made to optimize its use. One way to reduce rebar usage is to use welded splice instead of overlap splice. However, the Iranian Concrete Code only refers to the welded splice generalities and there are no rules on how to splice. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the tensile strength of welded splice bars with different configurations. For this purpose, rebars with diameters of 10, 14, 18, 22 and 25 were connected to each other by a variety of discontinuous and continuous overlap patterns by welding with the E6013 electrode. Then the tensile strength of the connected rebars was obtained by tensile test. Then, with Abaqus software and the birth and death method, a variety of splice patterns were modeled and the results were compared with laboratory results. The results show that the optimum welded splice is the model with discontinuous weld with a weld length of 5d.