NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE FLEXURAL BEHAVIOR OF STEEL PLATES REINFORCED WITH HYBRID FLAX/CARBON COMPOSITE PATCHES

For strengthening or rehabilitation of existing structures, patches of fiber-reinforced polymers (FRP) materials are being adhesively bonded to the existing metallic structures. So far, Carbon FRP (CFRP) are the main composite materials industrially implemented for metal structural reinforcement, due to their reliability and high mechanical performances. However, multiple researchers have highlighted the negative environmental impact of synthetic composite materials, and interest is shifting towards the use and development of bio-based composite materials. This paper presents an FE numerical investigation of the use of Hybrid Carbon/Flax FRP as an alternative solution for structural reinforcement of steel plates under flexural loading. Four different configurations of patches are studied to be bonded to steel rectangular plates, and three point bending tests are numerically modelled to simulate the flexural behaviour of the assemblies. Compared to the unreinforced steel plate baseline, reinforcements C5, F5, CFFFC, and FFFCC exhibited improvements of 149%, 120%, 137%, and 145% in bending stiffness, respectively.