Designing protective reinforced concrete (RC) beams against impact loadings is a challenging task. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the structural response of RC beams subjected to impact loads. Significant research efforts have been spent to unveil the impact response of RC beams by using analytical models, experimental testing, or numerical investigations. However, these studies used various assumptions in the analytical derivations and different test setups in the impact testing, which led to significantly different responses and observations of similar structures and similar loading conditions. For example, a minor change in contact surface can triple the maximum impact force of identical RC beams. This study provides a review of the contemporary understandings of the RC beam responses to impact loads, and explains the different observations and conclusions. Some unsolved issues for protective structures, that is, RC beams to resist impulsive loads are also discussed. It is suggested that future studies should take into consideration the conditions of the test setup, simplifications and assumptions made in analytical derivations for better interpretations of the obtained results.

设计抵抗冲击载荷的钢筋混凝土（RC）梁是一项艰巨的任务。它需要全面了解承受冲击载荷的RC梁的结构响应。通过使用分析模型，实验测试或数值研究，已经花费了大量的研究工作来揭示RC梁的冲击响应。但是，这些研究在分析推导中使用了各种假设，在冲击测试中使用了不同的测试设置，从而导致相似结构和相似载荷条件下的响应和观察结果显着不同。例如，接触面的微小变化可使相同RC梁的最大冲击力增加三倍。这项研究回顾了当代对RC梁对冲击载荷响应的理解，并解释了不同的观察和结论。还讨论了保护结构的一些未解决的问题，即抵抗脉冲载荷的RC梁。建议将来的研究应考虑测试设置的条件，分析推导中的简化和假设，以便更好地解释所获得的结果。