Rehabilitation of Concrete Bridge Beams with Fiber-Reinforced Composites

摘要

This paper describes an ongoing effort to demonstrate the feasibility of rehabilitating concrete beams in bridge decks with fiber-reinforced composites. In earlier work, the selection of appropriate materials and processes, flexural tests on scaled-down and full-sized concrete beams, and field implementation of the rehabilitation scheme were discussed. Although debonding between composite plate and concrete increased in service, flexural testing showed a negligible drop in maximum bending moment compared to baseline, unaged beams. In an alternative rehabilitation scheme, composite rods were embedded, with adhesive, into grooves cut into the tensile face of the beam. Flexural failure occurred at a bending moment comparable to that obtained with composite plates of equivalent cross-sectional area. However, ultimate failure was less catastrophic and, for the experimental setup used in this study, involved only partial fracture of the composite rods. The results therefore demonstrate the promise of this improved rehabilitation scheme.