## 1 Introduction  
Fiber-reinforced concrete (FRC), with fibers randomly distributed in the mass, improves plain concrete tensile strength, increases its ductility and reduces cracking at early ages [1; 2]. This aspect improves durability and reduces the maintenance costs. There are various types of fibers designed for the reinforcement of concrete: steel, glass, polymeric and natural ones, among others. Among of them, steel and polyolefin fibers provide structural characteristics to concrete [3; 4; 5; 6; 7]. Some concrete Standards [8; 9; 10; 11; 12] include the use of steel and polymer macro fibers for structural purposes if certain requirements are met. This may enable the reduction of the rebar reinforcement ratio in reinforced concrete, both for bending and shear [13; 14; 15], while reducing cracking [16; 17], and in particular the width of macro cracks. Some examples of structural fibers can be seen in [4; 5; 6; 7]. The use of structural fibers allows partial replacement of the bending reinforcement and the total or partial replacement of the shear reinforcement [18; 19; 20]. This results in a significant reduction in labor and construction time. Traditionally, steel fibers have been the most used ones for structural fiber reinforced concrete, but recently polymeric macro fibers have been developed seeking an alternative to steel fibers. Such fibers provide as main advantages: corrosion resistance [21], weight reduction and reduced deterioration of the construction machinery [22]. Structural concrete standards consider the structural contribution of fiber reinforcement from bending tests carried out with prismatic notched specimens [23; 24]. Model Code 2010 [8] and the Spanish Structural Concrete Standard (EHE-08) [12] consider as fiber-reinforced concrete with structural character one that meets two residual strength values in the bending tests: its stress for a crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) of 0.5 mm (\(f_{R3}\)) should be greater than 40% of the stress in the limit of proportionality (\(f_{LOP}\)) and, in addition, a 2.5 mm CMOD stress (\(f_{R3}\)) must be greater than 20% of the \(f_{LOP}\). Structural design of fiber-reinforced concrete, provided by structural concrete standards, is based on both bending residual stresses \(f_{R1}\) and \(f_{R3}\). For the evaluation of the strength of fiber-reinforced concrete under different loading conditions, such as tensile and shear, the value of \(f_{R3}\) is adopted according to the mentioned structural concrete Standards [8; 12]. However, it seems more appropriate to perform shear or tensile tests when the main stresses that FRC ought to bear is one of such. A recent study showed that the shear strength of fiber-reinforced concrete stipulated by the standards may differ from that obtained from a pure shear test [25]. In addition, the reinforcing mechanisms of the fibers when subjected to shear strength differ according to their characteristics, especially if steel fibers and polymeric ones are compared [26]. This study proposes a methodology based on the use of the prismatic notched specimens for bending tests, which supply \(f_{R1}\) and \(f_{R3}\), to perform, from its two halves, tensile and pure shear tests. In such a way the complete characterization of fiber-reinforced concrete is obtained under bending, tensile and shearing loading, without the need to produce new specimens. For this reason, prismatic specimens of dimensions \(600\times 150\times 150\) mm\({}^{3}\) and \(430\times 100\times 100\) mm\({}^{3}\) were performed and tested under bending conditions [23; 24]. The results of these tests confirmed structural capacity of the fiber-reinforced concretes. The remaining halves of the specimens were machined for direct tensile and pure shear testing. In addition, a video-extensometry system was used, which allowed to obtain the cracking patterns of the specimens during the tests.