Repair and strengthening of reinforced concrete structures using CFRPs

CFRPs offer a high strength lightweight alternative strengthening strategy to traditional methods using concrete overlays and/or steel plates in bridge engineering applications. In addition, the use of CFRPs may offer a viable retrofit/repair strategy in the case of damaged Structures, where this damage may be significant. This paper reports on the performance of CFRP-based strategies for the repair and strengthening of two 40% scale Continuous flat slab bridge models with significant damage arising from prior static testing to incipient collapse conditions. In addition, the performance after repair using a CFRP scheme of a RC beam-slab-column subassembly, following severe high-load cyclic testing, was also investigated. Results indicate that CFRPs offer a viable repair strategy in structural applications involving severe damage front the influence of static overload or extreme earthquakes but care needs be exercised to ensure secure adhesion where the surface under repair has locally adverse geometric features or has suffered large geometric deformation from the damage concerned.