Invited Speaker

Abstract: Steel bars have been widely used as soil slope nailing in highway engineering to avoid slope instability, while concerns have been raised about their corrosion in an aggressive soil environment. Glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) or basalt fibre reinforced polymer (BFRP) bars are associated with better resistance to corrosion and show potentials in such applications, but their bonding performance with concrete is inferior comparing to steel ones. However, associated research is limited to small-scale specimens in laboratorial conditions, and hence further investigations are required. In this study, full-scale field pull-out tests were conducted on three types of bars (i.e., steel, GFRP and BFRP) embedded by grouting in a soil slope. Test results show that the only failure mode of the specimens was the breakage of bars, which was different from laboratorial results. The maximum pull-out forces were therefore determined by the ultimate strengths of the bars, suggesting that a bonding length of 5 m was adequate to exploit the strengths of the bars with a diameter of 22 mm. In terms of the load-slip behaviors, three types of bars showed similar patterns before the yielding of the steel one. The pull-out load distributions in the bars showed an obvious decrease with the distance to the free ends, and such decreases were more obvious for steel bars. Test results support the feasibility of fibre-reinforced polymer bars for soil slope reinforcement.

Biography: Dr. Yiqing Dai is currently an Associate Professor at the College of Civil Engineering, Fuzhou University (China). He obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Southeast University (China) and his Ph.D. from Monash University (Australia). His primary research focuses on the application of fiber-reinforced composites and photovoltaic materials in civil engineering. Recognized as a high-level talent in Fujian Province, Dr. Dai has been awarded Fuzhou University's "Qishan Scholar" talent program. He has published over 30 SCI-indexed papers, with a Google Scholar H-index of 12.