Interfacial stresses in curved members bonded with a thin plate

The use of steel plates or externally bonded fibre-reinforced polymer laminates for flexural strengthening of concrete, masonry, timber or metallic structures is a technique that has become very popular. The effectiveness of this technique hinges heavily on the performance of the bond between the strengthening plate and the substrate, which has been the subject of many existing studies. In particular, the interfacial stresses between a beam and a soffit plate within the linear elastic range have been addressed by numerous analytical investigations. Surprisingly, none of these investigations has examined interfacial stresses in members with a curved soffit, despite that such members are often found in practice. This paper presents an analytical model for the interfacial stresses between a curved member of uniform section size and a thin plate bonded to its soffit. The governing differential equations for the interfacial shear and normal stresses are formulated and then solved with appropriate simplifying assumptions. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effect of the curvature of the member on the interfacial stress distributions in a simply supported curved beam for the two cases of a point load and a uniformly distributed load. The analytical solution is verified by comparing its predictions with those from a finite element model.