Influence of Compressive Strength of Concrete on Shear Strengthening of Reinforced Concrete Beams with Near Surface Mounted Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Polymer

This paper investigates the effect of using near-surface mounted carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (NSM-CFRP) on the shear strengthening of rectangle beams with low strength concrete (f′c = 17 MPa), medium strength concrete (f′c = 32 MPa), and high strength concrete (f′c = 47 MPa). The experimental program was performed by installing NSM-CFRP strips vertically in three different configurations: aligned with the internal stirrups, one vertical NSM-CFRP strip between every two internal stirrups, and two vertical NSM-CFRP strips between every two internal stirrups. All tested beams were simply supported beams and tested under a three-point loading test. The experimental results were compared with the theoretical capacities that were calculated according to the ACI 440.2R-17 and finite element analysis (FEA) that was conducted using ABAQUS software to simulate the behavior of all beams. The experimental results indicated that using NSM-CFRP limited the failure mode of all beams to pure shear failure with no debonding or rapture of the carbon strips. Moreover, the use of NSM-CFRP proved its efficiency by increasing the shear capacity of all beams by a range of 4% to 66%, in which the best enhancement was recorded for the case of using two unaligned NSM-CFRP strips. In general, the experimental shear capacities increased with the increase in the compressive strength of all beams. On the other hand, the ACI 440.2R-17 was conservative in predicting the theoretical shear capacities, and the FEA results agreed well with the experimental results.

Analysis of Columns Strengthened using Fibre Reinforced Cementitious Matrix Jackets

Maintenance, repair and strengthening of existing concrete structures, either reinforced or prestressed,are important activities of civil engineers. Nowadays different techniques are available for the strengthening. Various techniques were adopted for strengthening RC structures, namely, steel plates, external post tensioning, externally bonded Fibre-Reinforced Polymer (FRP), and near- surface-mounted FRP systems to increase shear and flexural capacity. During the last few decades, strengthening of concrete structural elements by fibre-reinforced polymer has become a widely used technique. But it has several disadvantages due to the epoxy resin like debonding of FRP from the concrete structure, unstable nature of the epoxy at higher temperatures etc. To overcome this, an upgraded system was introduced as an alternative for FRP known as Fibre Reinforced Cementitious Matrices (FRCM). The objective of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of Fibre-Reinforced Cementitious-Matrix materials as an alternative external strengthening technique for RC members. Columns with circular geometry were wrapped with different fibre materials using cementitious matrix. The analysis was done using ANSYS software. Keywords: RC columns, FRCM, Strengthening, fibre, ANSYS