The effect of fatigue test on short reinforced-concrete corbel strengthened by externally bonded composite fibre fabrics

This paper investigates the strengthening of a short reinforced-concrete corbel under fatigue test. The objective is to examine the behaviour of a short console under the influence of a fatigue test through a specified number of loading cycles. For the experimental program, four short reinforced-concrete corbels were tested and two of them were strengthened. Two of the four strengthened and reinforced-concrete corbels were submitted to static loading and the other two strengthened and reinforced-concrete corbels submitted to fatigue loading. In fact, the corbels are reinforced by wrapping them with carbon fibre fabrics. The number of cycles for the fatigue test is limited to one million. This study describes and compares the failure modes of different specimens. Indeed, the results showed that fatigue tests changed the cracking of corbels and also that using externally bonded carbon fibre fabrics significantly increased loads up to 82% with static loading.