Due to corrosion and the continuous demand to increase traffic loads, there is a need for an effective system which can be used to repair and/or strengthen steel bridges and structures. This paper describes an experimental program, recently completed, to investigate the fundamental behavior of steel-concrete composite scaled bridge beams strengthened with new high modulus carbon fiber reinforce...

The aim of this study was to investigate the combined effects of an aggressive environment and sustained load on the mechanical properties of wet lay-up fiber reinforced polymers (FRP). A total of 390 specimens, including 234 carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) specimens and 156 glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) specimens, were exposed to freeze–thaw cycles, hygrothermal aging, and wet–d...

Carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRP) were introduced to the aerospace, automobile and civil engineering industries for their high strength and low weight. A key feature of CFRP is the polymer sizing - a coating applied to the surface of the carbon fibres to assist handling, improve the interfacial adhesion between fibre and polymer matrix and allow this matrix to wet-out the carbon fibres. I...

Fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite materials have been widely used for retrofitting civil infrastructure systems. The ultimate goal of this study was to develop an in-site non-destructive testing (NDT) technique that can continuously and autonomously inspect the bonding condition between a carbon FRP (CFRP) layer and a host reinforced concrete (RC) structure, when the CRFP layer is used f...

Axisymmetric vibration of an infinite Pyrocomposite circular hollow cylinder made of inner and outer pyroelectric layer of 6mm-class bonded together by a Linear Elastic Material with Voids (LEMV) layer is studied. The exact frequency equation is obtained for the traction free surfaces with continuity condition at the interfaces. Numerical results in the form of data and dispersion curves for th...

This paper is concerned with analysis for the strengthening effect of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) on steel columns under cyclic lateral loading in thermal environment. Based on the finite element theory of thermo-elastic problem and steel structure stability theory, the hysteretic behavior of axial compression steel columns was studied by using Ansys software. The main variables inve...

A large wall with vertical cracks at mid-span, varying in width of up to 3 mm wide, had been declared capable of resisting a postulated seismic load. It was not straightforward to subsequently confirm, analytically, what influence the crack had on the wall’s capacity for lateral loading. It was assumed that it was likely that the horizontal reinforcement had yielded across the crack and thus th...

Coverage and connectivity are two important performance metrics in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we study the sensor placement problem to achieve both coverage and connectivity. Instead of using the simplistic disk coverage model, we use our recently proposed confident information coverage model as the sensor coverage model. The grid approach is applied to discretize the sensing fiel...

The present paper proposes a new diagnostic tool for the structural health monitoring that employs a Kriging Interpolation. Structural health monitoring is a noticeable technology for aged civil structures. Most of the structural health monitoring systems adopts parametric method based on modeling or non-parametric method such as artificial neural networks or response surfaces. The conventional...