Sustainable FRP-Confined Symmetric Concrete Structures: An Application Experimental and Numerical Validation Process for Reference Data

The use of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) jackets as external confinement is becoming popular, especially in seismic areas, because of its ability to enhance the strength and ductility of reinforced concrete to perform as a sustainable symmetric structural member. Therefore, various researchers have worked out for the prediction of strength and strain models of FRP-confined concrete. This study presents the improved strain models for the FRP confined cylindrical concrete members. Different previously proposed models of axial strain of FRP-confined concrete were evaluated based on a large database of 678 specimens from previous experiments and an improved model was proposed using the general regression analysis technique. Furthermore, the proposed model was validated using the previous experimental work of FRP-wrapped concrete cylinders and their finite elements analysis (FEA) using the ABAQUS software. The accuracy of the proposed strain model was quite satisfactory in comparison with the previous experimental and FEA results of the present study. Moreover, the proposed empirical strain model was used for the parametric study to investigate the effect of different geometric and material parameters such as the compressive strength of unconfined concrete, diameter of the cylinder, elastic modulus and thickness of the FRP layers, on the axial strain of FRP-wrapped cylinders. A close agreement among the proposed strain models and experimental outputs was observed. This study will help in understanding the behavior of sustainable FRP-confined symmetric concrete members.