NUMERICAL AND ANALYTICAL EVALUATION OF CONTINUOUS CONCRETE BEAM REINFORCED WITH FRP BARS

An innovative promising non corrosive material to be used in reinforcing concrete structures has emerged; which is the Fiber Reinforced Polymers. It has been used as replacement for conventional steel reinforcement for several concrete structural members. Yet, some of these structural members have not been studied intensively, such as continuous beams. Continuous beams as structural elements might exist in residential, commercial buildings as well as bridges. This paper uses the continuous beam element to investigate the predicted equations for the crack widths and the deflection at the serviceability limit state SLS assigned by various codes and guidelines, a finite element model was established using ANSYS software. This model was validated against the experimental work done by El-Mogy,M. (2011) which is the foundation of this research. Various codes were adopted to estimate the deflection and the crack width against the verified ANSYS model to distinguish if any further modifications are required. The used codes in this study are the Egyptian Code of Practice ECP, the American Concrete Institute ACI guidelines and the Canadian Standards Association CSA. It was found that the American and the Canadian codes produced approximately the same results in the crack widths while modifications should be done in the Egyptian code in order to be used in designing structures and perform as the other ones that are similar to reality; it yielded a percentage of variance of more than 50 percent than the other codes which is an unacceptable percent while in the deflection calculations, non- satisfactory results were conducted from all the used codes in this study with maximum variance of 200 % yielded by the Canadian code; the results were precise but not accurate when compared to the ANSYS model