Finite-Element Analysis of Textile-Reinforced Mortar Strengthening of Shear-Deficient Reinforced Concrete Beams

Abstract

In this study, nonlinear finite-element analysis (FEA) will be employed to investigate textile-reinforced mortar (TRM) jackets for shear strengthened reinforced concrete (RC) beams. FEA models of TRM shear strengthened RC beams will be developed and validated against experimental study from the literature. Subsequently, a parametric study will be conducted on the validated FEA models to examine the effect of various beams’ depths, load distributions, and orientations and stacking sequences of the textile’s mesh layers. The results of the parametric study show that increasing the cross section depth improved the load capacity of the shear strengthened RC beams and reduced the shear contribution of TRM. In addition, the shear influence of TRM was more dominant when the beams were subjected to a uniformly distributed load. However, the strengthening the beams with one or three layers of textile mesh that had a 45° orientation was the most effective configuration to improve the shear capacity (VR). For stacking sequences, the improvement in the shear strength of all models compared with the control were between 68.6% and 77.4%, which indicated that the ply sequences had an insignificant impact on the RC beam’s VR.