A preliminary study, conducted by Dorey and Cheng (1996), examined the potential of glass and carbon fiber reinforcement for glued laminated (glulam) timber beams. In that study, all of the fiber reinforced specimens showed a significant increase in strength over the unreinforced samples. A more comprehensive study of the behavior of glass fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) glulam beams was developed because of the combined technical and economical advantages achieved using glass fiber reinforcing. Since it has been shown that fiber fraction plays a major role in the capacity enhancement of the reinforced member, a range of fiber fractions were studied to determine the optimum percentage. The maximum strength and stiffness enhancements of 127% and 104%, respectively, were achieved by using a fiber fraction of 8.23%. A strain compatibility model was developed and it was found to provide very good predicted values.
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