Rehabilitation of timber beams with reinforced epoxy plates

Abstract

This paper discusses practical and theoretical issues concerning a rehabilitation system for timber beams, consisting of the replacement of the damaged or decayed parts by new pieces of timber, connected to the remaining original material through a cast-in-situ reinforced epoxy plate. Mild steel ribbed bars, stainless steel threaded rods and pultruded GFRP bars were used as reinforcement and the performance for each alternative was found through bending tests of a number of spliced beams. A proposal for an analytical model for the design of such system was developed, which shows good agreement with the experimental results.