In wet lay-up process, dry fiber sheets are saturated with a polymer and applied to the concrete surface by hand. This causes relatively large variation in properties of the cured FRP composite material. It is hard to know the exact mechanical properties of the FRP constructed by wet lay-up process. In addition, the stiffness of FRP changes during debonding process due to different amount of concrete attached to the debonded FRP at different locations. It is also inevitable to have considerable variations in the strength of concrete. Therefore, the behaviour of FRP bonded concrete members varies among specimens even when the same materials are used. The variation of localized FRP stiffness and concrete strength can be combined in a single parameter as variation of the localized interfacial fracture energy. In an effort to effectively model the effects of the variation of interfacial fracture energy on the load versus deflection responses of FRP bonded concrete specimens subjected to Mode I and Mode II loading, a random white noise using a one-dimensional standard Brownian motion is added to the governing equations, yielding stochastic differential equations. By solving these stochastic equations, the bounds of load carrying capacity variation with 95% probability are found for different experimental tests.
It has been assumed that the fiber-reinforced polymer/concrete interface is subjected to in-plane shear condition when intermediate crack debonding failure occurs. Therefore, the single shear pull-out test results are often used to predict the intermediate crack debonding failure in beams. In this study, the behavior of fiber-reinforced polymer-strengthened concrete beams and single shear pull-out specimens were studied experimentally and numerically. The bond-slip behavior of the fiber-reinforced polymer/concrete interface was obtained by single shear pull-out and beam tests. In all beam specimens, a concrete wedge located at the edge of the notch detached with the fiber-reinforced polymer debonding failure. This phenomenon shows that the initiation of debonding is due to a diagonal crack formation close to the major flexural/shear crack inside the concrete. The diagonal crack formation is due to a local moment at the tip of the notch. This causes the different stress state and slip of the fiber-reinforced polymer/concrete interface of beam specimens from that of the pull-out specimens. It is found that the bond-slip relation obtained from the pull-out test does not represent the bond-slip relation of the fiber-reinforced polymer/concrete interface in the fiber-reinforced polymer-strengthened concrete beams, and it cannot be directly used for predicting the load capacity of the fiber-reinforced polymerstrengthened concrete beams.
The bond between fiber-reinforced polymer and concrete substrate plays a key role in the performance of concrete structures after strengthened by externally bonded fiber-reinforced polymer composite materials. The single shear pullout test is generally used to determine the interface characteristics, and various bond-slip models have been proposed based on the results of this test. However, the sensitivity of the bond strength to the boundary conditions has not yet been considered in the available models in the literatures. This article presents an experimental and numerical study targeted at understanding the influence of the boundary conditions on the bond strength of the fiber-reinforced polymer/ concrete interface in the single shear pull-out test. The validated finite element analysis by experimental results is used for the sensitivity study of the bond strength and stress state of the interface to the boundary conditions of the concrete block. It is found that the constraint height of the concrete block at the loaded side is an influential parameter on the stress state of the interface and the bond strength.
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