RESEARCH ARTICLE


Investigation of Structural Response of Reinforced Concrete Beams Strengthened with Anchored FRPs



Constantinos B. Demakos*, Constantinos C. Repapis, Dimitrios Drivas
Department of Civil Engineering, Technological Education Institute of Piraeus, 250 Thivon and Petrou Ralli Str., Aigaleo 122 44, Athens, Greece.


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Creative Commons License
© 2013 Demakos et al.;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Civil Engineering, Technological Education Institute of Piraeus, 250 Thivon and Petrou Ralli Str., Aigaleo 122 44, Athens, Greece; Tel: +302105381558; E-mail: cdem@teipir.gr


Abstract

The beneficial effect of a composite material anchorage system (CMAS) upon the ductility and load capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) beams strengthened either with glass (GFRP) or carbon (CFRP) fabrics was investigated. The anchorage system consisted of U-shaped GFRP or CFRP strip (U-strip) at end of FRP. The U-strips were bonded around the beam section and further anchored by two tufts of glass fibres, each of them embedded at the opposite beam face and specifically in the region of compression zone of the beam web. Experimental evaluations in simply supported lightly reinforced concrete (RC) beams strengthened with one GFRP or a CFRP sheet anchored at its ends by the composite anchorage have shown that their bending capacity has increased by 8% and 17%, respectively, in relation to the capacity attained in similar RC strengthened beams without anchorage. On the other hand, their ductility was improved by an amount of 94% and 37%, respectively.

Keywords: Anchored FRP, ANSYS, experiment, finite element model, numerical modelling, reinforced concrete beam.