Experimental and numerical investigation on tensile concrete elements bonded with external CFRP sheets

Abstract

An experimental study is carried out on tensile concrete elements with external carbon fiber reinforced polymer sheets as reinforcement without any internal bars. The load-strain, tension stiffening relationships and mean distances between cracks are presented for the twin specimens. Additionally, a numerical analysis based on the stress transfer approach is implemented to investigate available bond-slip models and compare the deformation behavior with the experimental findings. Certain models were found to be better at predicting the tension-stiffening effect, whereas others were found to be more accurate at estimating number of cracks and crack spacing values, as the available bond models differ in their formulations and variables.