In recent years, the use of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) jackets, as an external lateral confinement has found considerable attention in retrofitting and strengthening existing reinforced concrete (RC) columns in earthquake prone areas. The FRP composites have numerous advantages such as ease in application, high strength and stiffness-weight ratio, no corrosion and negligible changes in the member dimension. Most of previous studies have concentrated on evaluation of the effect of confinement with spiral bars or FRP composites, separately. However, in practice both types of confinements exist in strengthening RC columns.
This paper presents the results of a computational modeling to...