• Advanced Composite Materials
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.277-299
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• 2008

High quality and expedient processing repair methods are necessary to enhance the service life of bridge structures. Deterioration of concrete can occur as a result of structural cracks, corrosion of reinforcement, and freeze.thaw cycles. Cost effective methods with potential for field implementation are necessary to address the issue of the vulnerability of bridge structures and how to repair them. Most infrastructure related applications of fiber-reinforced plastics (FRPs) use traditional hand lay-up technology. The hand lay-up is tedious, labor-intensive and relies upon personnel skill level. An alternative to traditional hand lay-up of FRP for infrastructure applications is Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM). VARTM uses single sided molding technology to infuse resin over fabrics wrapping large structures, such as bridge girders and columns. There is no work currently available in understanding the interface developed, when VARTM processing is adopted to wrap fibers such as carbon and/or glass over concrete structures. This paper investigates the interface formed by carbon fiber processed on to a concrete surface using the VARTM technique. Various surface treatments, including sandblasting, were performed to study the pull-off tensile test to find a potential prepared surface. A single-lap shear test was used to study the bond strength of CFRP fabric/epoxy composite adhered to concrete. Carbon fiber wraps incorporating Sikadur HEX 103C and low viscosity epoxy resin Sikadur 300 were considered in VARTM processing of concrete specimens.

• Composites Research
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.44-51
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• 2010

Recently, to solve the problems associated with the neutralization and corrosion of reinforced concrete compression members, the structural configurations such as CFFT (Concrete Filled GFRP Tube) and RCFFT (Reinforced Concrete Filled GFRR Tube) have been developed and applied to main members of civil engineering structure. These members can increase structural performance in terms of structural stability, ductility as well as chemical resistance compared with conventional concrete structural members. Many researches in numerous institutions to predict the load carrying capacity of the concrete compression member strengthened with FRP materials have been conducted and they have been suggested an equation for the prediction of the load carrying capacity of the members. Through the review of the research results, it was found that their results are similar each other. Moreover, it was also found that the results are not directly applicable to our specimens since the results are largely depended upon the member configurations. Also, since the accurate design criteria for the RC members strengthened with FRP such as RCFFT have not been established properly, relevant theoretical and experimental investigations must be conducted for the application to the practical structures. In this study, structural behavior of RCFFT was evaluated through compressive and quasi-static flexural tests in order to formulate design criteria for the structural design. In addition, the RCFFT members were also investigated to examine their confinement effect and the equations capable of estimating the compressive ultimate strength and flexural stiffness of the RCFFT members were proposed.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.427-439
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• 2007

The exploitation of fibre reinforced polymer composites, as external reinforcement is an evergreen and well-known technique for improving the structural performance of reinforced concrete structures. The demand to use FRP composites in the civil engineering industry is mainly due to its high strength, light weight, and stiffness. This paper exemplifies the shear strength of partially precracked reinforced concrete rectangular beams repaired with externally bonded Bi-Directional Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Fabrics strips. All specimens were cast in the laboratory environment without any internal shear reinforcement. The test parameters were longitudinal tensile reinforcement, shear span to effective depth ratio, spacing of CFRP strips, and orientation of CFRP reinforcement. It mainly focuses on the shear capacity and modes of failure of the CFRP strengthened shear beams. Results have shown that the CFRP repaired beams attained a shear enhancement of 32% and 107.64% greater than the control beams. This study underscores that the CFRP strip technique significantly enhanced the shear capacity of precracked reinforced concrete rectangular beams without any internal shear reinforcement.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.105-120
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• 2011

The strengthening and rehabilitation of reinforced concrete structures with externally bonded carbon fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) laminates has shown excellent performance and, as a result, this technology is rapidly replacing steel plate bonding techniques. This paper addresses this issue, and presents results deals with the influence of external bonded CFRP-reinforcement on the time-dependent behavior of reinforced concrete beams. A total of eight reinforced concrete beams with cracked and un-cracked section, with and without externally bonded CFRP laminates, were investigated for their creep and shrinkage behavior. All the beams considered in this paper were simply supported and subjected to a uniform sustained loading for the period of six months. The main parameters of this study are two types of sustained load and different degrees of strengthening scheme for both cracked and un-cracked sections of beams. Both analytical and experimental work has been carried out on strengthened beams to investigate the cracking and deflection performance. The applied sustained load was 56% and 38% of the ultimate static capacities of the un-strengthened beams for cracked and un-cracked section respectively. The analytical values based on effective modulus method (EMM) are compared to the experimental results and it is found that the analytical values are in general give conservative estimates of the experimental results. It was concluded that the attachment of CFRP composite laminates has a positive influence on the long term performance of strengthened beams.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.319-332
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• 2016

In most cases strengthening reinforced concrete columns exposed to high strain rate is to be expected especially within weak designed structures. A special type of loading is instantaneous loading. Rapid loading can be observed in structural columns exposed to axial loads (e.g., caused by the weight of the upper floors during a vertical earthquake and loads caused by damage and collapse of upper floors and pillars of bridges).Subsequently, this study examines the behavior of reinforced concrete columns under rapid loading so as to understand patterns of failure mechanism, failure capacity and strain rate using finite element code. And examines the behavior of reinforced concrete columns at different support conditions and various loading rate, where the concrete columns were reinforced using various counts of FRP (Fiber Reinforcement Polymer) layers with different lengths. The results were compared against other experimental outcomes and the CEB-FIP formula code for considering the dynamic strength increasing factor for concrete materials. This study reveals that the finite element behavior and failure mode, where the results show that the bearing capacity increased with increasing the loading rate. CFRP layers increased the bearing capacity by 20% and also increased the strain capacity by 50% through confining the concrete.

• Advances in materials Research
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.257-278
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• 2017

A simple closed-form solution to calculate the interfacial shear and normal stresses of retrofitted concrete beam strengthened with thin composite plate under mechanical loads including the creep and shrinkage effect has been presented in this paper. In such plated beams, tensile forces develop in the bonded plate, and these have to be transferred to the original beam via interfacial shear and normal stresses. Consequently, debonding failure may occur at the plate ends due to a combination of high shear and normal interfacial stresses. These stresses between a beam and a soffit plate, within the linear elastic range, have been addressed by numerous analytical investigations. Surprisingly, none of these investigations has examined interfacial stresses while taking the creep and shrinkage effect into account. In the present theoretical analysis for the interfacial stresses between reinforced concrete beam and a thin composite plate bonded to its soffit, the influence of creep and shrinkage effect relative to the time of the casting, and the time of the loading of the beams is taken into account. Numerical results from the present analysis are presented both to demonstrate the advantages of the present solution over existing ones and to illustrate the main characteristics of interfacial stress distributions.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.73 no.1
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• pp.53-64
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• 2020

In different high seismic regions around the world, many non-ductile existing reinforced concrete frame buildings, built without adequate seismic detailing requirements, have been damaged or collapsed after past earthquakes. The assessment and the retrofit of these non-ductile concrete structures is crucial theme of research for all the scientific community of engineers. In particular, a careful assessment of the existing building is fundamental for understanding the failure mechanisms that govern the collapse of the structure or the achievement of the recommended limit states. Based on the seismic assessment, the best retrofit strategy can be designed and applied to the structure. A school building located in Avellino province (Italy) is the case study. The analysis of seismic vulnerability carried out on the mentioned building has highlighted deficiencies in both static and seismic load conditions. The retrofit of the building has been designed based on different retrofit options in order to show the real retrofit design developed from the engineers to achieve the seismic safety of the building. The retrofit costs associated to structural operations are calculated for each case and have been summed up to the costs of the in situ tests. The paper shows a real retrofit design case study in which the best solution is chosen based on the results in terms of structural performance and cost among the different retrofit options.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.43-54
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• 2019

Existing reinforced concrete frame buildings designed for only gravity loads have been seismically vulnerable due to their inadequate column detailing. The seismic vulnerabilities can be mitigated by the application of a column retrofit technique, which combines high-strength near surface mounted bars with a fiber reinforced polymer wrapping system. This study presents the full-scale shaker testing of a non-ductile frame structure retrofitted using the combined retrofit system. The full-scale dynamic testing was performed to measure realistic dynamic responses and to investigate the effectiveness of the retrofit system through the comparison of the measured responses between as-built and retrofitted test frames. Experimental results demonstrated that the retrofit system reduced the dynamic responses without any significant damage on the columns because it improved flexural, shear and lap-splice resisting capacities. In addition, the retrofit system contributed to changing a damage mechanism from a soft-story mechanism (column-sidesway mechanism) to a mixed-damage mechanism, which was commonly found in reinforced concrete buildings with strong-column weak-beam system.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.144-152
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• 2010

In this study, cement-based filler is used as an adhesive instead of organic adhesive, epoxy because there were problems under wet condition. First, the bond strength of cement-based filler was measured and the result was satisfied with KS F 4716. However, in case of wet condition, bond strength of epoxy adhesive decreased $0.73N/mm^2$ in 7 days and $0.84N/mm^2$ in 14 days from pilot test. This implies that there would be a problem on reinforced concrete structure in wet condition, such as tunnel and sewage box. In the second experiment, the flexural strength of RC beams with GFRP using different thickness of cement-based filler was investigated, and the result was indicated 113%, 66%, 75% increase in 10mm, 20mm, 30mm thickness, respectively. From the result, it was known that 10mm filler thickness produces stable bond performance.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.131-139
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• 2017

Recently, earthquakes have frequently occurred near Korean peninsula. An experimental study is needed for developing a reinforcing method for seismic strengthening to apply to RC structures. Recently, PolyUrea (PU) as structural reinforcement materials has been receiving great interest from construction industry. The reinforcing effect of PU appeared to be excellent under blast and impact as well as earthquakes. In this study, Flexible Type PolyUrea (FTPU) developed in preceding studies was modified to develop Stiff Type PolyUrea (STPU) by varying the ratio of the components of prepolymer and hardener of FTPU. The material performance evaluation has been performed through hardening time, tensile strength and percent elongation test, pull-off test, and shore hardness test. The experimental results showed that STPU has higher tensile strength and lower elongation than FTPU. Therefore, STPU coating agent can be used for semi-permanent products. By using STPU with Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) on concrete columns, confinement effect can be enhanced to maximize seismic strength and ductility.