A New Design Model for Shear Strengthening of RC Beams using the Near-Surface Mounted Technique

This paper presents accurate, reliable and practical theoretical design equations for reinforced-concrete (RC) beams strengthened in shear with near-surface mounted (NSM) FRP reinforcement. Unlike other existing design equations, the proposed design equations can be used for RC beams strengthened with both NSM FRP bars and laminate, and are capable of predicting the failure mode of the NSM -strengthened beams. A state-of-the-art fracture mechanics-based NSM bond model has been incorporated to develop the proposed evolutionary design equations. The accuracy of the proposed design equations was validated using relevant experimental studies in the literature. The proposed design equations were able to achieve superior accuracy when the predicted results were compared with those of the existing models in the literature using different statistical measures.

Keywords:

Near-surface mounted , FRP shear rehabilitation , bond model , fracture mechanics.