| Summary: | Most of the today’s concrete structures are older than tenyears, and the need to strengthening existing structures is growing steadily. This is due to various reasons such as degradation due to ageing, environmentally induced degradation, poor initial design or construction and lack of maintenance, to name a few. Among the benefits of strengthening existing structures are; less impacts on the environmental and financial benefits. Therefore, there is a need to find alternative ways to strengthen concrete structures more effectively. For the past decades, several different strengthening methods have been studied. Two examples are externally bonded reinforcement (EBR) and near surface mounted reinforcement (NSM). The outcome of these studies has shown a significant enhancement to the structures. Steel plates and rebar have been used to strengthen concrete structures and have shown good increases in flexural capacity. For this purpose, resins have been used to implement the steel plates and rebar, e.g. shotcrete and epoxy. Due to the weight of steel and its sensitivity to corrosion, new materials have been sought. A promising material for this use is the fiber reinforced polymers (FRP). There are several types of FRP such as, carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP), glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) and aramid fiber reinforced polymer (AFRP). These new material has shown a better performance, due to their light weight, resistance to corrosion,etc. NSM and EBR perform extremely well in practice as long as sufficient anchorage is provided. However, a premature debonding has been observed by several researchers. This report will study an alternative method to reinforce existing concrete structures called “Side Near Surface Mounted Reinforcement (S-NSMR)” in association with a project run by Gabriel Sas at Luleå University of Technology. This is compared to Bottom Near Surface Mounted Reinforcement (B-NSM), which is a well-established method. It is assumed that the fiberutilisation will increase in NSM applied on the ...
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