Study of the design and flexural performance of an innovative Fiber Reinforced Polymer/steel-concrete composite beam

Abstract

A novel FRP/steel-concrete composite beam consisting of concrete slab and innovative hybrid FRP/steel hollow box shell takes full advantage of inherent and complementary properties of FRP, steel and concrete. To facilitate the practical application of this novel FRP/steel-concrete composite beam, preliminary design concepts were offered while analytical equations were derived to evaluate the flexural performance of the composite beam based on analysis of typical failure modes. Three FRP/steel-concrete composite beams with different steel volume fraction had been devised by the proposed design method, and four-point bending tests were conducted to investigate the failure mode, ultimate flexural capacity, deflection and interface slip. The practical composite beams exhibited satisfying structural behavior during the tests, while a fairly good agreement with the experimental results and the estimated values confirmed the reliability and feasibility of the preliminary design method.