The efficiency of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) materials for strengthening existing Reinforced
Concrete (RC) structures according to the Near Surface Mounted (NSM) technique can be greater
than the External Bonded Reinforcement (EBR) technique since the tensile strength of the FRP
materials is in general better exploited. Firstly, this paper deals with analyzing the effect of the
loading pattern on RC beams strengthened with both types of strengthening technique; in particular,
two loading patterns have been used for the experimental tests on simple supported beams: 1) a four
points bending scheme, and 2) a scheme with distributed loads, in order to check the sensitivity of
failure modes and ultimate loads to different distributions of bending moment and shear along the
beam. Then, a comparison between the results of flexural tests on RC beams strengthened with both
NSM and EBR techniques is dealt with
