Strengthening of Reinforced Concrete Beams Subjected to Concentrated Loads Using Externally Bonded Fiber Composite Materials

Renovation, restoration, remodeling, refurbishment, and the retrofitting of buildings often imply applying forces (i.e., concentrated loads) to beams that before were subjected to distributed loads only. In the case of reinforced concrete structures, the new condition causes a beam to bear a concentrated load with the crack pattern that resulted from the distributed loads which had acted before. If the concentrated load is applied at or near the beam’s midspan, the new shear demand reaches the maximum where cracks are vertical or quasi-vertical, and where inclined bars are not common according to any standards. So, the actual shear capacity can be substantially lower than new shear demand due to the concentrated load. This paper focuses on reinforced concrete beams whose load distribution has to be changed from distributed to concentrated and presents a design method to bring the beam’s shear capacity up to the new demand. The method consists of applying fiber composites (fiber-reinforced polymers or fiber-reinforced cementitious material) with fibers at an angle of 45° bonded to the beam’s web. This kind of external reinforcement arrangement has to comply with some practical measures, which are presented as well. The paper also provides the analytical model that predicts the concentrated load-carrying capacity of a beam in the strengthened state. The model accounts for the crack’s verticality, which nullifies the contributions of steel stirrups, aggregate interlock, and dowel action, and for the effective bond length of each fiber, which depends on the distance between the ends of the fiber and the crack it crosses.