Behaviour of steel plated RC columns subject to lateral loading

The main focus of this paper is to describe the behaviour of RC columns that are retrofitted with an alternative technique to "jacketing" or wrapping. This new technique consists of attaching steel plates to the flexural faces of a concrete column using bolts. It is envisaged that this technique would be suitable primarily for columns having rectangular cross-sections and in situations where lateral loading induces predominately a single plane of bending (as opposed to biaxial bending). Effectiveness of this new technique has been demonstrated by experimental testing and numerical simulations. This paper studies the mechanism of the new retrofit scheme, how it works, and the behaviour of columns retrofitted using such a scheme, as well as the important parameters that affect the response of the retrofitted columns. This study forms the basis for the design of the plate retrofitting system.