Structural analyses of extruded CFRP tendon-anchor system and applications in thin-walled aluminum/CFRP bridge

Abstract Pre-stressed carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) tendon system is developed. Extrusion method guarantees the strength of the CFRP tendon could be fully used in strengthening. The pre-stressed CFRP tendons are applied to strengthen aluminum beams and portable aluminum bridge to improve the flexural rigidity and load carrying capacity of these structures and the improvements are revealed by the experiments. Applying extruded CFRP tendon-anchor system, the load carrying ability of the pre-stressed aluminum bridge has an improvement of 25%. Structural models are proposed to investigate the pre-stressing effects, including the deflection and the load capacity under different design criteria. Finite element method (FEM) is applied to analyze the nonlinear behavior of the pre-stressed beam and reveal the plastic torsional buckling failure style. All these analyses agree well with the experiments and suggest accurate methods to design pre-stressed aluminum/CFRP structures.