STRENGTHING OF RC COLUMNS

The deterioration of concrete structures might be due to ageing, poor maintenance, corrosion due to poor environmental conditions and accidental situations like earthquakes. The need to upgrade the deteriorated civil engineering infrastructure greatly enhances with the ever increasing demands. Therefore rehabilitating and retrofitting civil engineering infrastructure has been identified as important issue to be addressed. Glass fiber is a new material consisting of closely spaced Glass and resins which is very effective in strengthening work. The basic idea is that it undergoes large strains in the neighborhood of the reinforcement and the magnitude of strain depends on the distribution and subdivision of reinforcement throughout the mass of concrete. In this book the strengthening of reinforced concrete columns using Glass fiber laminates are studied. In this study, the use of Glass fiber as an external confinement to concrete specimens is investigated. The effectiveness of confinement is achieved by comparing the behavior of retrofitted specimens with that of conventional specimen.