Shape Optimisation of Concrete Structural Elements Reinforced with WFRP (Wounded-Fibre-Reinforced-Polymer) Bars

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• Shizhe Hong, University of Cambridge, UK
• Friday 28 February 2025, 15:00-16:00
• CivEng Seminar Room (1-33) (Civil Engineering Building).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Shehara Perera.

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In 2022, building operations and construction accounted for 37% of total global energy and process related CO2 emissions (UNEP, 2023). Reducing these emissions is urgent. It is therefore worth rethinking the most used building material – concrete. One approach to lowering the embodied carbon of concrete structures is shape optimisation – using material only where it is needed and taking advantage of the fluidity of concrete to create non-prismatic structural elements (Orr 2012; Orr et al. 2014). Another approach is replacing traditional steel reinforcement by alternative reinforcement, such as WFRP (Wounded-Fibre-Reinforced-Polymer) Bars which show the potential to reduce the embodied carbon compared to their steel-reinforced counterparts (Pavlović et al. 2022; Garg and Shrivastava 2019; Inman et al. 2017). However, non-prismatic beams and slabs might be more prone to excessive deflection than their prismatic counterparts due to reduced flexural stiffness (Tayfur 2016). Additionally, WFRP -reinforced elements often exhibit greater deflection than steel-reinforced ones, because FRP bars (except carbon FRP ) typically have a lower elastic modulus than steel. To address this issue, it is necessary to optimise the shape of WFRP reinforced structural elements for Serviceability Limit State (SLS), ensuring they achieve lower embodied carbon than steel-reinforced ones whilst meeting design requirements for SLS . To achieve this, a theoretical method of shape optimisation for SLS is proposed, demonstrating higher efficiency than the existing method (Tayfur 2016). In addition, a flexural test on three BFRP (basalt FRP -) reinforced concrete slabs was conducted in the NFRIS (National Research Facility for Infrastructure Sensing) laboratory in 2024. This presentation will cover this experimental study on the deflection of non-prismatic slabs in flexure as well as the theoretical method of shape optimisation for SLS .

This talk is part of the Engineering Department Structures Research Seminars series.

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