Strengthening of RC bridge slabs using CFRP sheets

Abstract

Many old structures became structurally insufficient to carry the new loading conditions requirements. Moreover, they suffer from structural degradation, reinforcement steel bars corrosion, bad weather conditions…etc. Many official authorities in several countries had recognized many old bridges and buildings as structurally deficient by today’s standards. Due to these reasons, structural strengthening became an essential requirement and different strengthening techniques appeared in market. Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) strengthening techniques established a good position among all other techniques, giving excellent structural results, low time required and moderate cost compared with the other techniques. The main purpose of this research is to study analytically the strengthening of a reinforced concrete bridge slabs due to excessive loads, using externally bonded FRP sheets technique. A commercial finite element program ANSYS was used to perform a structural linear and non-linear analysis for strengthened slab models using several schemes of FRP sheets. A parametric study was performed to evaluate analytically the effect of changing both FRP stiffness and FRP schemes in strengthening RC slabs. Comparing the results with control slab (reinforced concrete slab without strengthening) it is obvious that attaching FRP sheets to the RC slab increases its capacity and enhances the ductility/toughness.