Experimental Studies on Bond Performance of BFRP Bars Reinforced Coral Aggregate Concrete

Basalt fiber reinforced polymer (BFRP) rebars reinforced coral aggregate concrete is a new type of concrete used in ocean engineering. In order to investigate the bond performance between BFRP rebars and coral concrete, 30 pull-out tests were carried out in 10 groups with different diameters of BFRP rebars, bonding lengths and strength of the coral concrete. The results show that good bonding between BFRP rebars and coral concrete were achieved. The main failure modes can be categorized as BFRP rebars pull out destruction, splitting failure of coral concrete and BFRP rebars fracture. The bond slip (tau-) curves of the BFRP rebars and coral concrete were obtained during the tests. It was found to be similar to the common concrete using fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) bars. The bond-slip relation can be roughly divided into micro-slip phase, slip phase, decline phase, and the residual stress stage. The bond between BFRP rebars and coral concrete increases with the increase of the bond length and diameter of BFRP rebars, but the average bond stress will decrease. Moreover, increasing the strength of coral concrete is effective to improve the bond performance of BFRP rebars. In this paper, the continuous bond slip model (Gao et al. in J Zhengzhou Univ 23:1-5, 2002) was used to represent the tau-s constitutive relationship of BFRP rebars and coral concrete. The analysis show that the proposed model has a high degree of accuracy in representing tau-s curve of BFRP rebars and coral concrete.