Flexural and Shear Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Beams Strengthened with Carbon Textile Reinforced Concrete

Recently, textile reinforced concrete (TRC) has been intensively studied for strengthening reinforced concrete (RC) and masonry structures. This study is to experimentally explore the effectiveness of application of carbon TRC to strengthen RC beam in flexure and shear. Concerning the cracks formation, failure modes, ultimate strength and overall stiffness, the performance of the strengthened beams compared to the control beams were evaluated from two groups of tests. The test results confirm that the TRC layers significantly enhance both shear and flexural capacity of RC beams in cracking, yielding and ultimate loads. All of the tested specimens were also modelled using ABAQUS/CAE software, in order to validate the experimental results. The numerical results show that the simulation models have good adaptability and high accuracy.