Analysis of Beam Openings Strengthened by Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Using ANSYS

In the construction of modern buildings, many pipes and ducts are necessary to accommodate essential services like water supply, sewage, air-conditioning, electricity, telephone, and computer network. Usually, these pipes and ducts are placed underneath the soffit of the beam. The depth of ducts or pipes may range from a couple of centimetres to as much as half a meter. The presence of the opening leads to reduction in stiffness, cracking, excessive deflection and reduction in the strength of the beam. By wrapping Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) sheets, retrofitting of concrete structures provide a more economical and technically superior alternative to the traditional techniques in many situations because it offers high strength, low weight, corrosion resistance, high fatigue resistance, easy and rapid installation and minimal change in structural geometry. In this paper, the behaviour of RCC beam with square opening in shear zone strengthened by CFRP sheets were studied. This paper is to investigate the three different CFRP techniques and which will more effective were analysed by ANSYS 15. In this, four beams were modelled, one beam with opening in shear zone is considered as control beam. The remaining three beams were strengthened by CFRP techniques that is inside the opening, around the opening and both inside and around the opening. For each loading case, deflection corresponding to different load values can be tabulated and compared. Also crack pattern is obtained for different CFRP techniques and will analysed. Among all these techniques, it can be concluded that the strengthening with CFRP both around and inside the opening was found more effective and improving the load carrying capacity about three times greater than control beam.