Analytical analysis of the interfacial shear stress in RC beams strengthened with prestressed exponentially-varying properties plate

In this paper, a closed-form rigorous solution for interfacial shear stress in simply supported beams strengthened with bonded prestressed E-FGM plates and subjected to an arbitrarily positioned single point load, or two symmetric point loads is developed using linear elastic theory. This improved solution is intended for application to beams made of all kinds of materials bonded with a thin plate, while all existing solutions have been developed focusing on the strengthening of reinforced concrete beams, which allowed the omission of certain terms. The theoretical predictions are compared with other existing solutions. Finally, numerical results from the present analysis are presented to study the effects of various parameters of the beams on the distributions of the interfacial shear stresses. The results of this study indicated that the E-FGM plate strengthening systems are effective in enhancing flexural behavior of the strengthened RC beams.