Flexural Strength of RC Continuous Beams Strengthened by CFRP Using EBR and EBROG Methods: Experimental and Analytical Study

Recently, a new proposed technique named; Externally Bonded Reinforcement on Grooves (EBROG) has been presented as a strengthening method to postpone or eliminate the undesirable debonding failure mode that is accompanying to Externally Bonded Reinforcement (EBR) method. This paper introduces an experimental and analytical study to evaluate the validity and accuracy of the formulas that were introduced by the standard codes and researchers, in estimating the ultimate load of RC continuous beams strengthened with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheets in flexure. The experimental program includes testing of ten RC beams with cross section of (200×130) mm and two equal spans, each span has a 1050 mm length. The comparison between the ultimate load collected from the test results and that predicted using ten different analytical models is conducted. It is found that the ACI 440.2R-17 and most of other analytical models well predicted the ultimate load of RC beams strengthening with one layer of CFRP sheets using EBR, but most of these models significantly underestimate the ultimate load of tested beams that were strengthened using EBROG method. ACI, Shehata el. al., and Teng et al. models give close predicted load to the experimental results in case of EBR beams strengthened with two layers.