Rehabilitation of Shear damaged Reinforced Concrete Beams with U-Wrapped Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Sheets: Experimental study

Abstract

This paper presented an experimental study of external rehabilitation of damaged Reinforced Concrete (RC) Beams with Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) sheets. The primary objective is to study the shear behavior of four simply supported beam specimens with an total length of 1700mm, a width of 150 mm, and a depth of 250 mm was tested under a monotonic two-point load. The variable used in this study was the specimen damage ratio (50%, 60%, and 70%), while the layout of CFRP sheets and shear-span to effective depth ratio (a/d = 2.5) were kept constant. The design of the examined beams was according to ACI 318M-19 to ensure shear failure. From this study, it was concluded that external rehabilitation with U-shape CFRP sheets offered a very adequate and efficient rehabilitation method for damaged RC beams. Each beam's behavior was examined concerning the crack pattern, first crack load, load-deflection and ultimate load. The CFRP rehabilitation has improved the ultimate load capacity of damaged beams by about 10.91% to 15.96% compared with the expected remaining ultimate load capacity of control specimens without rehabilitation, as well as an increment in the deflection of mid-span from  -6.81%, 24.11% at an ultimate load.