An application of high performance fiber reinforced cementitious composites for RC beam strengthening

The possibility of using concrete materials with tensile hardening behavior (High Performance Fiber Reinforced Cementitious Composites, HPFRCC) for strengthening R/C beams is investigated. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution, full scale tests have been performed on 4.5 m long beams. A beam without any reinforcement and a beam with a low reinforcement ratio, equal to 0.03%, have been strengthened with a jacket in HPFRCC having a thickness of 40 mm. A third beam with the same low reinforcement ratio but without HPFRCC jacket, has been used as reference specimen. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique both at ultimate and serviceability limit states.