A REVIEW ON STRENGTHENING OF RC CYLINDER ELEMENTS USING BASALT FIBER REINFORCED POLYMER COMPOSITES

Strengthening of RC structures is to upgrade the resistance of the structure to withstand underestimated loads and increase the load carrying capacity for loads such as seismic loads. The maintenance and rehabilitation of structural members, is perhaps one of the most crucial problems in civil engineering applications. The use of externally bonded Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) systems has been proven to be an effective technique to rehabilitate and strengthen deficient and deteriorated structural members. The FRP materials are known to have high stiffness, high strength to weight ratio, resistance to corrosion and ease of installation. In this external strengthening technique, the FRP materials are attached to the tension side of RC beams or girders to carry the tensile stresses by means of the epoxy adhesive. In general, the FRP plates are bonded to the soffit of the beams and the sheets are attached at anchorage zones to provide a locking mechanism that would increase the load carrying capacity of the structural member. However, the introduction of FRP materials showed better performance than the conventional methods due to the several mechanical advantages of the FRP materialsThis increases the beam strength and its stiffness (load required to cause unit deflection), however decreases the deflection capacity and ductility, curing period. In recent years, retrofitting by bonding of fiber reinforced polymer Basalt fiber-reinforced polymer (BFRP) bars are the newest type of FRP reinforcement used in civil engineering. Nevertheless, BFRP reinforcement is a relatively new material, so behavior of BFRP RC elements should still be thoroughly examined. This paper presents a review summary of detailed literature survey conducted on BFRP composites. This paper briefly review the bond-slip characteristics, retrofitting, and fire, shear strengthening, flexural behaviour, reinforcement ratio of different FRP composites.