ABSTRACT
The Flexural results of all the beams tested in this series are shown in Table 1.
It can be observed that for the composite beams involving the GFRP I-Sections, they generally exhibited higher failure loads than the plain GFRP I-Section by a factor of 37% (IB2) to 124% (IB3). The type of bonding system used, concrete type and GFRP Section type had the most significant effect on maximum load attained as well as resulting deflection. The composite beams with concrete bonded either with steel bolts (IB3) or Epoxy A + bolts (IB4) showed higher failure loads than that bonded with Epoxy A (IB1) alone. Beams IB3 and IB4 also demonstrated much more ductility compared to beam IB1 as shown in Figure 1. The main differential is in the significantly
higher deflection exhibited by beam RB4 bonded with Epoxy A compared with RB3 bonded with Epoxy B which showed much higher stiffness (Figure 2). For group R2, beam RB3 with 100 mm slab width showed higher stiffness in the early load regimes, but attained lower ultimate failure load than beam RB1 with 50 mm slab width.
