Effect of the NSM material and area on the flexural response of normal strength concrete beams internally reinforced with GFRP and steel bars

Strengthening the steel-reinforced concrete (RC) beams by fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) elements have become common several years ago. Recently, the RC beams internally reinforced with FRP reinforcement, especially Glass FRP (GFRP) bars, became popular worldwide. The carbon FRP (CFRP) elements (strips and bars) were recently used to strengthen the internally GFRP RC beams. In contrast, using the GFRP elements to upgrade the RC beams, especially those with GFRP bars as the main tensile reinforcement, was rarely studied. In this paper, the GFRP bars were implemented as near-surface mounted (NSM) elements to upgrade the beams reinforced in their tension side with GFRP or steel bars. All beams were experimentally loaded in flexure using a four-point loading scheme. The experimentally studied parameters were the main tensile reinforcement area, NSM area, and main reinforcement properties. Moreover, a numerical model was established and validated using the available experimental data to investigate the impact of main and NSM materials properties and areas on RC beam response. The experimental results highlighted that increasing the internal and NSM GFRP area by 96% and 100 % increased the beam capacity by 61.6% and 59.7%, respectively, which underlined a slightly higher efficiency of the main reinforcement than NSM bars on the beam load capacity. In addition, substituting the main steel with GFRP bars for the beams upgraded with NSM GFRP reinforcement enhanced their capacities by 11.33–15.1%. This emphasized the great effect of the linear response of the FRP materials and their higher tensile strengths than steel on the interaction between the main and NSM reinforcement, especially after the steel yielding. The FE results showed the highest load capacity using CFRP and GFRP bars as main and NSM reinforcement for the simulated beams. Conversely, using CFRP bars as NSM strengthening was more efficient than GFRP bars for the RC beams with steel or GFRP bars.