As the world’s infrastructure begins to age, it is becoming more and more necessary to rehabilitate these structures; it has also become necessary to retrofit structures so that they meet new seismic design codes. Traditional materials such as concrete and steel have been used to perform these upgrades, but recently with increases in technology, fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) have been leading the field in the rehabilitation and retrofit of in-situ structures.

Recently the use of FRP for the external reinforcement of concrete has become widely used. The system has proven to be effective, but the bond length and anchorage of the end of the sheets has been a concern when strengthening structures in shear or flexure. To address the end anchorage, tests have been conducted using steel plates to anchor the sheets but they are only effective in the laboratory, because of corrosion problems.

This report looks at an anchorage system using all FRP materials. A system that is totally composite removes the possibility of corrosion problems with the environment and electrical incompatibility between steel anchors and Carbon FRP materials. The system looked at in this report also reduces the amount of stress concentration at the anchor location.

For this experiment, the goal was to characterize the anchor by looking at anchor bar size, groove size, location, and bar width. A total of eighteen (18) specimens were tested with parameters changing to represent all the variables. The specimens were all prepared by the same method and tested in the same testing apparatus. During the tests, load, strain, and center deflection were measured using a computerized data collection system.

The results of the tests show that the anchor system increases the ultimate capacity of the FRP system by as much as 48%. The results show that this anchorage system is effective and can easily be transferred to conditions in the field.