Rehabilitation of Shear Deficient Steel Beams Using BFRP Fabric

Abstract This paper serves to demonstrate an effective method to address the structural deficiencies of steel I-shaped beams suffering from a corrosion defect in the web. This section loss from the corrosion was rehabilitated by the application of unidirectional basalt fibre reinforced polymer (BFRP) fabric. Seven steel beams were tested utilizing 4-point bending load. Two of the beams tested were reference specimens - a control undamaged beam and a control corrosion (damaged) beam. The remaining five specimens were corroded beams rehabilitated using BFRP fabric. The study was completed using both experimental and numerical techniques. The study found that use of BFRP fabric is an effective method for restoration of the stiffness, yield load, and ultimate load capacities of these shear deficient steel beams. Further, the repair effectively returned the once structurally deficient beam to that of an undamaged beam. A nonlinear finite element model was successfully developed and validated using the test data. This validated model was used to determine the best orientation and optimum number of layers of BFRP fabric required to rehabilitate these shear deficient steel beams.