Experimental and theoretical investigation of the structural behavior of reinforced glulam wooden members by NSM steel bars and shear reinforcement CFRP sheet

Abstract Reinforcing the wooden structural members is considered as a challenging matter to overcome the drawbacks of using wood in the construction field. The current investigation, therefore, presents an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of utilizing steel bars as reinforcements in glulam timber beams using the near-surface-mounted (NSM) technique in conjunction with carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheet wraps. A series of flexural testing was carried out until failure for both reinforced and unreinforced glulam members in a simple support system. Eleven specimens were examined in two groups to compare them with the control beam. Five reinforced glulam (RG) beams of the first group were reinforced with different schemes at tension and compression zones using the same bar size. The other five specimens of the second group were reinforced with shear reinforcement using fully wrapped strips made of CFRP sheet in addition to the same flexural reinforcement schemes as the first group. Each glulam beam has a span of 1.35 m and a rectangular section sized 85 mm × 175 mm. Based on experimental outcomes, theoretic modeling was provided to estimate the ultimate load capacity and bending rigidity of reinforcing glulam members. Though several theoretical predictions of flexural capacity were overstated when compared to experimental predictions, these disparities were frequently about 10%, confirming that the proposed theoretical model was accurate, and the mean of ultimate loading capacity and deflection between experimental and theoretical results were 1.01 and 1.09, respectively. Experimental results presented show that the RG beams performed much better than the unreinforced reference beams in terms of structural behavior, with improvements in ultimate load capacity ranging from 16 to 49%. On the other hand, the shear reinforcement for RG members slightly improved flexural performance, and the ultimate load capacity increased by 2–7%. Therefore, it was concluded that the NSM techniques using ordinary steel bars were effective ways in strengthening the glulam members in terms of flexural stiffness with increasing ultimate load capacity.