Effect of discrete steel fibres on strength and ductility of FRP laminated RC beams

Abstract

Many of the several authors have reported that reinforced concrete (RC) beams strengthened with externally bonded fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) laminates/sheets considerably reduced its ductility due to increase in stiffness that leads to debonding type of failure without adequate prior notice. This study aims to investigate the strength and ductility of glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) laminated RC beams incorporated with different volume fraction (Vf = 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5) of discrete steel fibres. From the experimental evaluations, the role played by the incorporation of steel fibres is found to be effective in enhancing both the strength and ductility of FRP strengthened beams at all level of volume fractions, used in this study. Finite element analysis based full-scale beam models were developed using ANSYS software to model the response of all beams, as well, and the load-deflection behaviour of the models exhibit good agreement with the experimental results.

Keywords

• GFRP
• SFRC
• FEA
• Non-linear analysis
• ANSYS
• Debonding