Abstract
Timber is widely used as a structural element because of its engineering and mechanical properties. This study focuses on the flexural behavior of timber beams externally reinforced with carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites at the tension face and the responses of the fundamental principal compression arch because of confinement from end anchorage. Beams of three different types of timber are studied. All the beams had the same length, width, and span length and were tested under four-point loading. Different CFRP lamination techniques were adopted, with and without U-clamp confinement as end anchorage, to investigate the flexural capacity enhancement of CFRP strips as reinforcement for timber beams. The profile of the principal compression arch is estimated experimentally from fundamental flexural strain-along-depth phenomena by post-processing high definition images extracted from test videos employing digital image correlation technique (DICT) in the MATLAB R2011a framework. Similar responses were found from finite element analysis using ANSYS 11.0. Effective confinement of the principal compression arch produced significant enhancements of flexural capacities and stiffness in the strengthened timber beams.
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