New Analytical Analysis-Oriented Stress-Strain Model for FRP-and-Steel Confined Concrete

Application of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites in the strengthening of reinforced concrete (RC) structures has become an increasingly accepted engineering practice. In particular, the use of externally bonded FRP wraps as a confining material for concrete can enhance both the compressive strength and the ultimate strain of concrete, making it suitable for strengthening and/or seismic retrofit of existing RC columns. This paper focuses on a recently developed analysis-oriented iterative FRP-and-steel confinement model for concrete and proposes a new optimization procedure to obtain an analytical expression for the corresponding monotonic envelope, reduce the associated computational cost, and increase the corresponding numerical robustness. Several analytical functions were evaluated in terms of their capability to fit the iteratively-generated stress-strain monotonic envelope for confined concrete. The newly proposed analytical formulation of the confined concrete stress-strain model was compared with the original iterative formulation in terms of computational cost for two examples of nonlinear seismic response analyses for: (1) an experimentally-tested concrete-filled FRP tube bridge column of a two-column bridge pier; and (2) a five-span bridge structure with FRP-retrofitted RC piers. It is found that the use of the newly proposed optimization-based analytical monotonic envelope can reduce by more than 30% the computational time associated with the original iteration-based monotonic envelope with negligible changes in the structural response prediction at both global and local levels.

Automated summary

The application of FRP composites in the strengthening of RC structures is widely accepted. This paper proposes a new optimization method to obtain an analytical expression for the stress-strain monotonic envelope of concrete and reduce computational cost. Experimental results showed that the use of the proposed analytical monotonic envelope can significantly reduce computational time with minimal impact on structural response prediction.