ENHANCING OF FLEXURAL STRENGTH OF WEB OPENING REINFORCED GEOPOLYMER BEAMS BY USING FRP STRIPS

Abstract

This study is devoted to inspect the flexural behavior of Geopolymer reinforced concrete beams with “large” web transverse opening and strengthened by three kinds of Fiber Reinforced Polymer materials. The implemented experimental program comprised casting eight beams under static and “one stage” repeated load, two of these are normal concrete beams and the others are Geopolymer beams. These beams are divided into two groups, the first comprised four beams of solid and beams “with transvers web opening” under static load for normal and Geopolymer concrete beams. The second group are of four Geopolymer beams that one of them is “un strengthened and having transvers web opening” while the others are also have transvers web opening but strengthened by different kinds of Fiber Reinforced Polymer materials sheets that installed vertically aligned and accompanied with the 90mm diameter large circular web opening. The strengthening materials included are Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer, Glass fiber Reinforced Polymer and Hybrid (one layer of Glass + one layer of Carbon) reinforced polymer sheets. The results showed that for the ultimate load capacity was decreased by 9.96% for holed normal concrete beam if compared with solid normal concrete solid beam while such capacity was decreased 2.25% and 11.89% for solid and holed Geopolymer beams respectively. In addition to that, the maximum load capacity is also decreased by 8.16%, 10.20% and 12.25% for Glass, Carbon and Hybrid fiber reinforced polymer strengthened beams if compared with reference beams “holed un strengthened beam” subjected to cyclic load.