Performance Based Review and Fine-Tuning of TRM-Concrete Bond Strength Existing Models

Abstract

Textile reinforced mortars (TRMs) are new composite materials which were considered as a proper alternative for fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs) to strengthen various structural elements. In comparison to FRPs, the TRMs have more fire resistance, more environmental consistency and are safer the structural elements because of their better bond to substrate and various failure modes. There are a lot of existing models to calculate the bond strength between TRMs and concrete substrate. But, most of them originated from the FRP-concrete bond models and are not accurate enough to estimate the TRM-concrete bond strength. In this paper, new TRM-concrete bond models were calibrated to predict the bond strength between various TRM composites and the concrete substrate. To achieve this goal, a database including 221 experimental direct shear tests were compiled and a simple existing model was selected to be calibrated via soft computing techniques. It was found that the presented novel models could be accurately utilized to anticipate the TRM-concrete bond strength with various types of fibers and different geometrical features with R value of 0.6909 and NMAE error value of 12.62%.

Keywords

• textile reinforced mortar (trm)
• fiber reinforced polymer (frp)
• bond strength
• calibration process
• soft computing techniques