Comparative Study of Basalt And Carbon FRP Bonded Steel Beams and its Finite Element Modelling
The use of Fibre Reinforced Polymer (FRP) sheets to strengthen the steel structures has become an attractive option which may ensure confident retrofitting of existing steel structures. Conventional strengthening techniques for huge steel structures consist of welding additional elements like steel plates or channels to existing structure. In such techniques, the dead load of that enlarged section becomes larger which may result in its ineffectiveness and the added steel plates are also susceptible to corrosion. On the contrary, use of FRPs in strengthening steel structure becomes advantageous due to high strength-to-weight ratio, ease of their drilling and anchoring to existing steel structure and high resistance against corrosion and chemical attacks. In recent years, use of Glass, Aramid and Carbon fibre sheets has become more popular for retrofitting works of R.C.C structures. Therefore it has become a topic of interest for many researchers to examine the effect of FRP sheets in the field of steel retrofitting works.
In this paper an attempt has been made to study flexural behaviour of steel I-beam using basalt fibre sheets and carbon fibre sheets. The results obtained from experimental work have indicated improvement in flexural strength of FRP bonded beams. The comparative results of flexural strength of I-beams bonded with Basalt fibre sheets and carbon fibre sheets are discussed here. Also, the paper includes the finite element modelling of control beam (beam without bonding any FRP material) and FRP sheet bonded beam from ANSYS v.13 software.