Behavior of High Strength Hybrid Reinforcement Concrete Beams

Six proposed simply supported high strength-steel fiber reinforced concrete (HS-SFRC) beams reinforced with FRP (fiber reinforced polymer) rebars were numerically tested by finite element method using ABAQUS software to investigate their behavior under the flexural failure. The beams were divided into two groups depending on their cross sectional shape. Group A consisted of four trapezoidal beams with dimensions of (height 200 mm, top width 250 mm, and bottom width 125 mm), while group B consisted of two rectangular beams with dimensions of (125 ×200) mm. All specimens have same total length of 1500 mm, and they were also considered to be made of same high strength concrete designed material with 1% volume fraction of steel fiber. Different types and ratios of FRP rebar were used to reinforce these test beams. The study’s principle variables were the amount and type of flexural reinforcement (glass FRP and basalt FRP) and beam cross-sectional shape (rectangular and trapezoidal). The load-deflection behavior and ultimate load capacity of the beams were studied and compared with one another under flexural test with symmetrical two-point loading. The results show that increasing the reinforcement ratio resulted in higher post cracking flexural stiffness, and higher residual strength, as well as caused an increase in the first cracking load and ultimate load capacity ranged from 3 to 16.9%, and 4.6 to 7.3% respectively. When the GFRP rebars replaced by BFRP, the overall beams flexural performance showed outstanding improvements. Moreover the results indicate that increasing the top width of the beam cross section led to a significant enhancement in the first crack load ranged from 16 to 32.4%, also a remarkable increases in the ultimate load capacity in the range of 35.5 to 35.8% were indicated in the trapezoidal beams compared to rectangular beams. However the results show that the deflections were similar and were approximately 1.07–1.54 mm for all test beams. It is worth noting that the general flexural behavior of all the test beams indicated a ductile behavior with a gradual reduction in strength and high residual strength pre to failure due to proposing steel fiber presence

Experimental Study of Behaviour of Reactive Powder Concrete Strengthening by NSM-CFRP Corbels

The research contain an experimental examination for the behaviour of reactive powder concrete corbels, strengthened with  varying orientation of  Near Surface Mounted Carbon Fiber Reinforcement Polymers (CFRP) strips. Six reactive powder concrete corbels were tested. Divided into two groups, each group contain three specimens, one of them without strengthening takes as control corbel specimen, two corbels in each group strengthened by inclined and horizontal near surface mounted carbon fiber reinforced polymer (NSM-CFRP) stripes, other variable was the shear span to the effective depth ratio (a/d) to study the influences of those variables on the ultimate strength carrying capacity, cracking pattern, cracking load, vertical deflection, failure modes. The results showed an important improvement in the behaviour and load capacity of strengthened reinforced RPC corbels in addition to enhancing the stiffness of corbels. For group A where a/d =0.65, the percentages of increase in load failure were about (10.3% - 15.45%) for inclined and horizontal strengthening respectively, and for group B where  a/d =0.4, the percentages of  increase in load failure were about  (7.1% - 14.6%) for inclined and horizontal strengthening respectively