Abstract

Through this article the study being done at the Faculty of Engineering of Rosario, referring to the use of sheets pultruded Reinforced Polymer Fiberglass (GRP) to increase the bending strength of reinforced concrete beams is presented, THESE layers are one of the elements of compound materials most commonly used in these type of reinforcements. The material most widely distributed worldwide that constitutes it is the carbon fibers, but its high cost discourages the use in the repair of structures in the Argentine market. One of the goals of this research program is to check the possibility of replacing such sheets by fiberglass elements of Argentinean production and significantly cheaper. The results of the tests demonstrated the feasibility of this alternative. In addition, the increased thickness of the sheets of fiberglass allows the use of additional bolted anchors, which give the system supporting capacity post critical and ductility, much needed features, for example, for structures in seismic zone.

Abstract

The near surface mounted (NSM) fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) reinforcement is emerging as a promising alternative strengthening technique to externally bonded reinforcement (EBR) for increasing the load carrying capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) members. NSM FRP technique has several advantages, in comparison with the EBR method, such as reducing the risk of debonding, and a better protection from the external sources of damage. In this research, the performance and effectiveness of the NSM and EBR techniques for the flexural strengthening of RC beams are compared. In order to achieve this objective, six full-scale, RC beams were strengthened with different carbon FRP (CFRP) schemes and tested. Such beams were designed to fail in a flexural mode. Test results indicated that if the same amount of CFRP is used, beams strengthened with NSM strips achieved higher ultimate load than those strengthened with EBR. Such increase in the ultimate load ratio ranged between 12% and 18%. Furthermore, a design approach for computing the moment capacity of RC flexural members strengthened with NSM CFRP strips is developed and presented in this paper.