Design for strengthening works using STAAD or Bentley products

[AlbertStructural]

Hello Everybody,
I have a question related to strengthening design of mostly concrete members. For example if we have a beam or column or slab having deficient strength and we want to reinforce it using FRP wrapping / plates etc or by steel plate bonding or by increasing the section size, then how this strengthening information be put in our analysis model? Especially for the case of CFRP. Is there any software that allows us to bond the CFRP to any RCC member (model and simulation) and then calculate the stresses based on enhanced properties of that RCC member? Any thoughts / ideas strongly appreciated.
Regards

 

[SethGuthrie]

I can't think of any way to handle that correctly with STAAD.pro or most general purpose finite element analysis tools. A Google search turns up some recent scholarly papers and the like where custom programs are being developed and then correlated to test specimens. e.g.

http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI3033076/

 

[AlbertStructural]

Hi SethGuthrie,
Thanks for response. I have done some modelling and simulation using ANSYS (advanced finite element package) but it is quite laborious and complicated task to get reasonable results from such an advanced and complex package. Also with such FEM package you concentrate mostly on one element i.e. individual beam, column etc and can't easily see the overall picture and effects of strengthening on structure as a whole.

 

[AlbertStructural]

There is one thing I am gonna try. Mostly for surface pasted CFRP plates the additional area provided by CFRP (thickness multiplied by width) is taken as sort of additional steel area (with different E-value). So i will try to analyze normal beam without any external strengthening and then using some extra steel area and assuming it is not extra steel but some surface rebars. Afterall what matters is the overall steel area. There are some obvious catches and flaws here but those can be accounted if done carefully.