STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING AND MECHANICS, cilt.41, sa.4, ss.509-525, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
In recent years, CFRP material usage in strengthening applications gradually became widespread. Especially, the studies on the strengthening of shear deficient reinforced concrete beams with CFRP strips are chosen as a subject to numerous experimental studies and research on this subject are increased rapidly. The most important variable, that is affected on the failure mode of CFRP strips and that is needed for determining the shear capacity of the strengthened reinforced concrete beams, is the strain distribution between CFRP strips and concrete. Numerous experimental studies are encountered in the literature about the determination of strain distribution between CFRP strips and concrete. However, these studies mainly focused on the CFRP strips under axial tension. There are very limited numbers of experimental and analytic studies examining the strain distribution between concrete and CFRP strips, which are under combined stresses due to the effects of shear force and bending moment. For this reason, existing experimental study in the literature is used as model for ANSYS finite element software. Nonlinear finite element analysis of RC beams strengthened against shear with CFRP strips under reverse cyclic loading is performed. The strain distributions between CFRP strips and concrete that is obtained from finite element analysis are compared with the results of experimental measurements. It is seen that the experimental results are consisted with the results derived from the finite element analysis and important findings on the strain distribution profile are reached by obtaining strain values of many points using finite element method.