NUMERICAL MODELLING OF CFRP STRENGTHENED REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS UNDER IMPACT LOADING

In the recent years, externally bonded carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites are commonly used to strengthen existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures. In everyday practice, there are many situations under which deteriorated structures are subjected to impact loads. Thus, it is essential to have a comprehensive understanding of the response of CFRP strengthened RC beams subjected to impact load. This paper aims at providing a numerical model which is able to represent the behaviour of this kind of structures. It is worth noting from previous studies that CFRP strengthened RC beams can fail in several scenarios including flexural and shear failure in concrete (or mix between them), debonding of the CFRP layers and rupture in the CFRP. Thus, it is important to build a numerical model can capture all possible failure modes that could occur in the case of CFRP strengthened RC beams subjected to impact loads. The damage criteria were used for the concrete, CFRP and contact between concrete and CFRP to capture the failure that may occur. The proposed numerical model was then validated against set of samples tested in previous studies. It was found that the numerical model can capture the test results with high level of accuracy.