AN INVESTIGATION ON THE STRESS TRANSFER IN CONCRETE BEAMS BONDED WITH FRP PLATES

Strengthening of concrete beams by the external plate bonding technique has become an increasingly important research area over the last two decades, especially with the increasing applications of the advanced fibre reinforced composites. Unlike the un-strengthened beams, the composite structure shows an undesirable failure of plate debonding. It has been well recognized that the central to this failure mode is the stress concentration at the plate end. This paper reports a novel interfacial stress formulation for the FRP bonded RC beams subjected to arbitrary loadings. It is featured as a compact formulation with improved accuracy. Numerical solutions are given to compare the simplified solutions with those obtained from more rigorous formulations and alternative solution