FINITE ELEMENT MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF RC BEAMS WITH GFRP AND STEEL BARS

Infrastructural deterioration due to corrosion of reinforcing steel bars under aggressive condition mainly in marine environment is a major challenge facing the construction industry, which causes failure of most of the concrete structures. The corrosion of steel bars can be controlled by replacing the steel bars with corrosive resistance materials such as Fiber reinforced polymers (FRP). FRP bars are emerging and promising alternative material to steel bars in concrete structures. Due to non-corrosive nature of FRP, it improves the durability of RC structures. Experimental based method is widely used to find the behavior of concrete structures it gives a real life results, it is a time consuming process and material used for testing is quite high cost. In this work a non-linear finite element analysis was carried out to simulate the behavior of RC beams with GFRP and steel bars. Finite element modelling was done using ANSYS software. Four beams were modeled in ANSYS. Two beams taken as control beams each with Steel and GFRP bars used concrete beams. Remaining Two beams were with the combination of Steel and GFRP bars used in concrete beams by varying the reinforcement percentage. Structural performance like Load-Deflection, crack pattern and flexural capacity were studied and results obtained from the finite element analysis was validated with experimental test results conducted by Wenjun et al [16]