The paper presents results of experimental tests carried out on concrete beams reinforced with glass fibre polymer reinforced (GFRP) bars, which have become recently one of the main substitutes for traditional steel reinforcement. GFRP bars were used in this research as the longitudinal and transverse reinforcement. An objective of the study was to investigate the influence of the shear reinforcement ratio on the shear capacity of GFRP reinforced concrete beams in comparison with the corresponding beam without shear reinforcement. Single-span, simply-supported T-section beams reinforced in flexure with 5 GFRP bars of 25 mm diameter were reinforced in shear with closed GFRP stirrups of 8 mm diameter applied in three variable spacings: 250 mm, 200 mm and 120 mm. The analysis of test results, failure modes and shear capacity is discussed in the paper in respect to investigated parameters.

The Goss texture is a characteristic feature of grain-oriented transformer steel sheets. Generator sheets, which are produced as non-oriented steel sheets, should have isotropic features. However, measurement results of generator sheets, confirmed by crystallographic studies, indicate that these sheets are characterized by certain, quite significant anisotropy. The first purpose of this paper is to present the influence of textures of generator and transformer steel sheets on their magnetization characteristics. The second aim is to propose a method which takes into account the sheet textures in the calculations of magnetization curves. In calculations of magnetization processes in electrical steel sheets, models in which the plane of a sheet sample is divided into an assumed number of specified directions are used. To each direction a certain hysteresis loop, the so-called direction hysteresis, is assigned. The parameters of these direction hystereses depend, among other things, on the texture type in these steel sheets. This paper discusses the method which calculates the parameters of these direction hystereses taking into account the given sheet texture. The proposed method gives a possibility of determining the magnetization characteristics for any direction of the field intensity changes.