USE OF FRP SHEETS TO STRENGTHEN THE EXISTING BEAMS

The rehabilitation of existing reinforced concrete (RC) bridges and building becomes necessary due to ageing, corrosion of steel reinforcement, defects in construction/design, demand in the increased service loads, and damage in case of seismic events and improvement in the design guidelines. Fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) have emerged as promising material for rehabilitation of existing reinforced concrete structures. The rehabilitation of structures can be in the form of strengthening, repairing or retrofitting for any type of deficiencies. RC rectangular-section is the most common shape of beams and girders in buildings and bridges.

A repair mechanism for the concrete beams with a particular percentage of damage has been attempted. CFRP which is a well-accepted & efficient material for repair & rehabilitation is used in this study. The reinforced concrete beams has been tested and performance under single point loading setup. CFRP sheet were bounded to the beams with different configuration with the main objective of increasing the service life load capacity.

In a set of experiments, all beams were subjected to a certain level of loading to create damage and then repaired with CFRP sheet with different configuration except one beam i.e. control beam and another one beam was repaired under sustain loading condition.

The overall objective of this study is to investigate the performance and failure modes of RC beams strengthened with externally bonded CFRP sheets. In order to achieve these objectives, an extensive experimental program consisting of testing five full scale RC beams will be carried out.