Blast responses and damage evaluation of concrete protective arches reinforced with BFRP bars

To develop corrosion resistant arches in waterfront protective engineering, basalt fiber reinforced polymer (BFRP) bars and hybrid BFRP-steel bars are applied to build concrete arches to replace traditional steel bars. Four types of arches with different reinforcements were designed and casted for the in-field explosion experiment. The scaled distance changes from 0.542 m/kg1/3 to 0.108 m/kg1/3 for a total of 14 explosion tests. The arches suffer five levels of damage, from none damage, slight damage, medium damage, severe damage and complete collapse, judged from cracks and spalling at the vault. The exploded arches were also compressed quasi-statically to check their residual load carrying capacity, which is obviously reduced by severe spalling. In current experiments, the BFRP bars reinforced arch (BBRA) has comparable or even better blast-resistance than the steel bars reinforced arch (SBRA). A theoretical analysis based on improved finite differential method was proposed to predict the dynamic response of the BBRA. According to the research, BBRAs with excellent corrosion resistance and blast resistance could replace SBRAs in waterfront protective structures.