Flexural behaviour of GFRP reinforced concrete beams under cyclic loading

This paper examines the flexural performance of concrete beams reinforced with glass fibre-reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars under fatigue loading. Experiments were carried out on concrete beams of size 1500x200x100 mm reinforced with 10 mm and 13 mm diameter GFRP bars under fatigue loading. Experimental investigations revealed that fatigue loading affects both strength and serviceability properties of GFRP reinforced concrete. Experimental results indicated that (i) the concrete beams experienced increase in deflection with increase in number of cycles and failed suddenly due to snapping of rebars and (ii) the fatigue life of concrete beams drastically decreased with increase in stress level. Analytical model presented a procedure for predicting the deflection of concrete beams reinforced with GFRP bars under cyclic loading. Deflection of concrete beams was computed by considering the aspects such as stiffness degradation, force equilibrium equations and effective moment of inertia. Nonlinear finite element (FE) analysis was performed on concrete beams reinforced with GFRP bars. Appropriate constitutive relationships for concrete and GFRP bars were considered in the numerical modelling. Concrete non linearity has been accounted through concrete damage plasticity model available in ABAQUS. Deflection versus number of cycles obtained experimentally for various beams was compared with the analytical and numerical predictions. It was observed that the predicted values are comparable (less than 20% difference) with the corresponding experimental observations.