A stress-function variational approach toward CFRP -concrete interfacial stresses in bonded joints

This paper presents an innovative stress-function variational approach in formulating the interfacial shear and normal stresses in an externally bonded concrete joint using carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP) plies. The joint is subjected to surface traction loadings applied at both ends of the concrete substrate layer. By introducing two interfacial shear and normal stress functions on the CFRP-concrete interface, based on Euler-Bernoulli beam idea and static stress equations of equilibrium, the entire stress fields of the joint were determined. The complementary strain energy was minimized in order to solve the governing equation of the joint. This yields an ordinary differential equation from which the interfacial normal and shear stresses were proposed explicitly, satisfying all the multiple traction boundary conditions. Lamination theory for composite materials was also employed to obtain the interfacial stresses. The proposed approach was validated by the analytic models in the literature as well as through a comprehensive computational code generated by the authors. Furthermore, a numerical verification was carried out via the finite element software ABAQUS. In the end, a scaling analysis was conducted to analyze the interfacial stress field dependence of the joint upon effective issues using the devised code.