RC COLUMN STRENGTHENING BY FIBRES

The deterioration of concrete structur es might be due to ageing, poor maintenance, corrosion due to poor environmental condi tions and accidental situations like earthquakes. The need to upgrade the deteriorated c ivil engineering infrastructure greatly enhances with the ever increasing demand s. Therefore rehabilitating and retrofitting civil engineering infrastructure has been iden tified as important issue to be addressed. G lass fiber is a new material consisting of closely spaced Glass and resins which is very effective in strengthening work. T he basic idea is that it undergoes large strains in the neighborhood of the reinforcement and the magnitude of strain depends on the distribution and subdivision of reinforcement t hroughout the mass of concrete. In this book the strengthening of reinforced con crete columns using Glass fiber laminates are studied. In this study, the use of Glass f iber as an external confinement to concrete specimens is investigated. The effectivenes s of confinement is achieved by comparing the behavior of retrofitted specime ns with that of conventional specimen