CICE 2010 - The 5th International Conference on FRP Composites in Civil Engineering

September 27-29, 2010 Beijing, China

An Experimental Investigation into the Behaviour of Filament Wound

Hybrid FRP-Concrete Beam
A. Chakrabortty, A. Khennane (a.khennane@adfa.edu.au), and E.V. Morozov
School of Engineering and Information Technology, UNSW@ADFA, Canberra, Australia
ABSTRACT: This study presents the results of an experimental investigation into the performance of hybrid beams wrapped with filament winding. A cost-effective pultruded profile was used to reduce the high initial cost of the beam. High strength concrete was cast on top of the pultruded profile to take the compressive
forces and CFRP laminate at the bottom to take the tensile forces. The whole system was then wrapped with
GFRP using filament winding to eliminate the debonding of the concrete from the pultruded profile. Two different lay-up types of wrapping 45o and 90o /45o were used. The experimental results show that the wrapping did not only eliminate the debonding of concrete from the pultruded profile but also increased the overall
stiffness and the load carrying ability of the beam. As a result, the beams carried a significant amount of load
before failure.

1 INTRODUCTION
If in the past the use of composite materials in the
field of construction was predicated on improved
performance attributes, better enviro-mechanical durability, and ease of transportation and construction,
then in the near future, it is very likely that it will be
on energy efficiency. A study was done to compare
the energy consumption of using various materials
such as steel, aluminum, composites and reinforced
concrete for construction from the stages of extraction of raw materials, production and fabrication of
the material, delivery of the material to the construction site and maintenance throughout the design life
of the structure (Daniel, 2003). It was found that
composites consume approximately half the total
amount energy as any other construction material
considered. In this manner, FRP material promises
to be a greener construction option over concrete
and steel. Despite these advantages over conventional materials, composites are making limited progress in the field of highway structures, where the
only niche markets for composites is in FRP deck
construction over steel girders and externally bonded
FRP repair. One of the main reasons of this limited
progress is their expensive production cost (Hota et
al. 2002). Cost-effective manufacturing processes
such as pultrusion and filament winding can help
considerably in reducing this initial cost of FRPs
when produced in large volumes.
The present study presents the results of an experimental program into the behaviour of hybrid
FRP-concrete beams using a pultruded profile and
wrapped with filament winding. It also proposes a

new design method where the CFRP laminate is

used to tailor the stiffness of the beam rather than
serves as a warning sign of failure.
2 DESIGN
2.1 Description of the beam
We propose to design and test a series of beams,
whose typical cross section is shown on Figure 1.
The beam consists of a pultruded profile, a high
strength concrete block, a CFRP laminate, and a
filament wound GFRP wrapping. The concept in itself is not new, it has already been trailed by (Deskovic et al, 1995; Canning et al, 1999; van Erp et al,
2002) to cite only a few, but the wrapping using
filament winding, and designing the CFRP laminate
to tailor the stiffness of the beam is not reported.

Figure 1: Hybrid beam cross section

The beams are designed to carry a minimum load

of 50 kN over a span 1.29 m in four point bending
and deflect less than L/600 as recommended in
AS5100 for reinforced concrete beams.

for
using Maple yields the thickness of the
CFRP laminate, which is obtained as 1.14 mm. A
CFRP laminate of 1.2 mm thickness is chosen as this
is a standard thickness.

2.2 Section dimensions

2.3 Load carrying capacity

In reinforced concrete design, the span to depth

ratio varies between 10 and 20. The lower limit of
10 is chosen so that a deeper beam can be achieved
and the problem of a lack of stiffness of a thin
walled GFRP box section can be addressed. Thus,
for a span of 1.29 m, the depth of the hybrid beam,
H is chosen as 200 mm. The height and width of the
pultruded profile are imposed and respectively equal
to 152 mm and 102 mm. The height of the concrete
block is chosen as 40 mm. The thickness of the
wrapping is variable as different lay-up will be
tested. However, for initial dimensions, we choose it
to be equal to 2 mm.

2.3.1 Lateral stability

CFRP laminate thickness

Total maximum mid span deflection of a simply
supported beam under four point bending can be expressed as:

Max

Bend

(1)

Shear

where Bend represents the deflection due to bending

and expressed as:

Bend

Pa 3L 4a
2

/ 24 EI

(2)

and Shear obtained as:

Shear

Pa / GA f

(3)

where a represents the shear span and fs represents

the shear factor, see (Hulatt et al. 2003).
Expressing the stiffness rigidity and the neutral
axis of the beam respectively as:
(4)

and
(5)

with
D E c bC 2 E P bt w

2 E P t w d E L b1t 2 E g b2 t g 2 E g t g H 2t g

where, Ec, EP, EL and Eg are the elastic modulus of

concrete, pultruded profile, CFRP and GFRP laminate respectively, and solving the equation
(6)

Generally pultruded box sections have high resistance to lateral torsional buckling. However, to satisfy the design requirements and to prevent lateral
instability, height to width ratio is often checked by
the following relation (Deskovic et al. 1995),

C h / b k
(7)

According to Deskovic (1995), for thin-walled composite hybrid sections the value of k is around 3. For
this beam cross section the value of k is obtained as
1.88, which is well within the accepted value.
2.3.2 Web buckling load
Another possible mode of failure of this beam is
through buckling of the pultruded box section webs.
To make sure that the beams webs are stiff enough
to take the design load and would not buckle, theoretically the web buckling load was calculated using
the formulas given in (Holmes and Just, 1983,
Deskovic et al. 1995).
The web buckling load was obtained as 1303 kN,
which is well above the assumed design load.
2.3.3 Flexural capacity
The ideal scenario is for the beam to fail through
concrete crushing. Using strain compatibility, as
shown on Figure 2, the moment capacity of the
beam at which the concrete should crush is calculated and compared to the external applied moment
caused by the 50 kN load. Based on a crushing strain
of concrete, equal to c = 0.0026 measured on a cylinder, the ultimate moment capacity of the section
was found to be equal to 40.9kN.m, which is four
times greater than the design moment of 10.75kN.m.

Figure 2: Strain compatibility

3 EXPERIMENTAL PROGRAMME

Figure 3: Mid-span load displacement curves

To investigate the effect of filament wound wrapping on the performance, three beams were wrapped
with different lay-ups. The first beam, labeled A,
had no CFRP reinforcement and was wrapped up
with a 45o/90o lay-up. The second and third beams
labeled B and C, were reinforced with a 1.2 mm
thick CFRP laminate, and wrapped up with 45o and
45o/90o lay-ups respectively. All the beams were
tested in four point bending.
Figure 3 shows the load-displacement curves for the
beams. For the sake of comparison, an extra curve
for a beam with a hand lay-up wrapping (Khennane,
2009) is added. It can be clearly seen that filament
wound wrapping increases not only the stiffness but
also the load carrying ability of the beams. The
beam without any CFRP reinforcement displays
enough stiffness when compared to the beam having
a hand lay-up process, which had CFRP reinforcement.
The beam without CFRP reinforcement failed
through local bearing capacity at the support. Even
though this constitutes a premature failure, the load
displacement curve for this beam still shows that
dissipation of energy can be obtained through tearing and splitting of the pultruded profile as previously reported by Bank et al. (2001) when testing
pultruded profile for use as safety crash barriers.
To avoid this sort of premature failure, the remaining beams B and C were reinforced at the support as shown on Figure 5 with a block made of Delrin, a plastic material that is easily machined and
having similar stiffness properties as a pultruded
profile. This inhibited the failure at the support and
allowed the beams to fail through concrete breaking
in the zero shear area. The concrete did not crush,
but rather failed in a sudden fashion accompanied by
a loud sound. Figures 6 and 7 show the failure of the
beam. The brittleness of the high strength concrete
apparently did not allow for energy dissipative behavior.

Figure 4: Failure of Beam A

Figure 5: Support reinforcement with a plastic block

Figure 6: Failure of the beam

4 CONCLUSION

Figure 7: Failure of the concrete block

A total of 18 strain gauges were placed on each

beam. Figure 8 shows the strains in the top and bottom fibres at mid-span for beam B.
At peak load, the top fibre recorded a compressive strain of 0.0033. Although this strain is recorded on the wrapping, it does suggest that the
strain in the concrete top fibre is within the vicinity
of this value. This proves that the wrapping does
confine the concrete since the ultimate compressive
strain of the concrete recorded in a standard compressive test was only 0.0026. However, the confinement hence introduced is not enough as to provide ductility to the concrete. Current research is
focused on using high strength concrete reinforced
with steel fibers to improve the pseudo-ductility of
the beam.

Figure 8: Strains in top and bottom fibres for bean B

In terms of stiffness and load carrying ability, the

beam C with 45o/90o performed extremely well
reaching a load of 350 kN, which is seven times the
deflection governed design load. This corresponds to
a moment of 75.25 kN.m, which is nearly twice the
predicted ultimate moment of 40.9 kN.m. It is clear
that the developed analytical theory based on a
crushing strain of concrete of 0.0026 is very conservative as the confinement effect, albeit small, is not
taken into account. Further theoretical developments
are warranted.

The results obtained from the experimental data and

analyses enable the following conclusions to be
drawn:
the wrapping of a hybrid beam using filament
winding not only enhance the stiffness but also
the load carrying ability;
when a pultruded profile is subject to concentrated
loads, the local bearing capacity should be improved as to inhibit premature failure through
tearing and splitting of the profile;
the wrapping does introduce some form of confinement to the concrete but not sufficient enough
as to induce a ductile behavior;
future research should focus on improving the
ductility of the concrete block through the introduction for example of steel fibres (an experimental investigation is currently underway), and the
development of reliable theoretical models to
predict the ultimate load carrying capacity.
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