Investigation on bond behavior of steel-FRP composite bars in engineered cementitious composites by spliced beam tests

Abstract

The collaborative utilization of steel-FRP composite bar (SFCB) and engineered cementitious composites (ECC) represents a favorable choice for engineering structures exposed to aggressive environments, offering benefits involving both mechanical behavior and durability. This paper primarily studies the bond performance of SFCB embedded in ECC through spliced beam tests coupled with finite element analysis. The findings demonstrate that with an appropriate cover thickness or transverse confinement, spliced ECC beams exhibit failure modes characterized by splitting and pull-out. Under such conditions, the bond-slip response demonstrates limited sensitivity to changes in cover thickness and transverse confinement. Conversely, increasing the cover thickness or introducing transverse confinement in spliced concrete beams, which exhibit splitting failure, significantly enhances the bond strength. Furthermore, in contrast to spliced concrete beams, spliced ECC beams are observed to demonstrate a bond toughness that is 3.85–12.10 times greater. The discrepancy in bond toughness between ECC and concrete diminishes as the cover thickness and transverse confinement increase. Notably, the uniform distribution of bond stress in the splice region of ECC beams remains unaffected by variations in splice length. To incorporate the impact of bond stress distribution when calculating the splice length of SFCB in ECC beams, a coefficient of 0.85 is introduced.