Influence of elevated temperatures on epoxy adhesive used in CFRP strengthening systems for civil engineering applications

Abstract

This paper presents experimental investigations about the influence of elevated temperatures on the mechanical behaviour of an epoxy adhesive typically used in carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) strengthening systems and numerical investigations about the influence of changes underwent by the adhesive on the response of bonded joints between CFRP strips and concrete. The experiments included shear and tensile tests at elevated temperatures (up to 120 °C) on a commercial epoxy adhesive. In both types of tests, the mechanical response of the adhesive at different temperatures was assessed, namely in terms of stress vs. strain curves, stiffness, strength and failure modes. The results obtained highlighted the considerable reduction of both shear and tensile properties with increasing temperatures: at 70 °C the shear and tensile strengths are both reduced to around 15% of the corresponding ambient temperature strengths, while the tensile and shear moduli can be considered negligible. Analytical formulae were fit to the test data, describing the reduction with temperature of the adhesive's tensile and shear properties. In the numerical investigations, three-dimensional finite element models were developed to simulate previous double-lap shear tests performed on concrete blocks strengthened with CFRP strips according to either the externally bonded reinforcement (EBR) or the near surface mounted (NSM) techniques, using the epoxy adhesive characterized in the present study. Two distinct modelling strategies were adopted for the concrete-CFRP bond in order to assess the relative importance of the adhesive distortion and interfacial slippage at the concrete-adhesive-CFRP interfaces in the overall slip between concrete and CFRP: (i) to explicitly simulate the adhesive, considering the mechanical properties determined in the tests and assuming a perfect bond at all interfaces; and, alternatively, (ii) to simulate the CFRP-concrete interaction by means of global bilinear bond-slip laws for different temperatures. Comparison between numerical results and test data allowed quantifying the relative importance of the adhesive distortion and of the interfacial slippage at the bonded interfaces as a function of temperature, providing a better understanding of the contribution of these two mechanisms to the CFRP-concrete bond at elevated temperature. While the former effect is the most relevant at ambient temperature, with elevated temperature the interfacial slippage at the bonded interfaces becomes the most relevant mechanism.