Assessment of the strengthening effectiveness of EBR and NSM techniques for beams’ dapped-end by FEM analysis

Abstract

This document presents the work related to the assessment of the effectiveness of strengthening reinforced concrete (RC) dapped-end beams using carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP). Several non-linear finite element analyses were performed using different strengthening configurations, from the simplest solutions to the more complex ones in which different application schemes were overlapped. The work is focused on evaluating the strengthening systems, considering the ultimate capacities they can lead to and the failure modes involved. There were modeled 17 different strengthening configurations. While some of them provided a marginal increase in the ultimate load that can be applied, several of them provided significant load bearing capacity increase. The observed failure modes ranged from a sudden failure of the whole strengthening system up to the desired progressive failure of the individual components of each strengthening system.