Deflection of Reinforced Concrete Beams Strengthened with Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) Plates

This paper investigates the deflection of reinforced concrete beams strengthened with fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) plates. The calculated deflections of reinforced concrete beams strengthened with FRP using Branson’s equation, adopted by ACI Code, were found to be underestimated. Therefore, a method for calculating the deflections of FRPstrengthened reinforced concrete beams is proposed. In addition, alternative expressions for calculating the effective moment of inertia for FRP-strengthened beams at the cracking and post cracking stages are developed. The deflections calculated using the proposed expressions were found to correlate well with the measured deflections in laboratory beam tests. A numerical example illustrating use of the proposed procedure is also presented.