Flexural retrofitting of the damaged reinforced concrete beams by using HPFRCC

Damaged structures are not usually reliable to tolerate designed loads and therefore, it is required to retrofit structural parts. The main purpose of this paper is to utilize High-Performance Fibre-Reinforced Cement-based Composite (HPFRCC) as a high-performance material to recover the damaged beams and improve their ductility and moment capacity with experimental approaches. In addition, a retrofitting method was presented using HPFRCC. The experimental study was performed on three simply supported beams with the same dimension, materials, and reinforcement configuration. The first beam, known as the reference beam, is subjected to the pure bending condition until its failure and the others are prone to a certain amount of load according to the final capacity of the first beam. Thereafter, two damaged beams are retrofitted using HPFRCC in the created grooves on the tensile surface of the beam; finally, these retrofitted beams are loaded to determine the bending behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that retrofitting can improve the first crack strength, load in yield condition, and maximum load capacity. Also, the proposed method increases the ductility and energy absorption of retrofitted beams. (C) 2020 Sharif University of Technology. All rights