Composite Rebar's New Application

FRP rebar got its start in Japan in the 1980s, with carbon and aramid fiber reinforcements in thermoset matrices, and slowly spread to projects in Canada during the early 1990s. But it didn’t really take off, until specifications were developed and published for composite rebar in the late 1990s. The civil engineering community’s progress toward comfort with FRP rebar might be slow, but it has not discouraged the pursuit of new approaches to its manufacture that could.

For electromagnetically sensitive applications, composite rebar reinforcement and polymer are inherently nonconductive, so they won’t transmit current, attract lightning strikes or interfere with the operation of nearby electrical devices. That makes it a safer choice in aluminum and copper smelting plants, nuclear power plants, specialized military structures, airport towers, electrical and phone transmission towers, manholes containing electrical or phone equipment, hospitals with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment and toll-road sensing arrays and collection booths. Because glass-reinforced composite is equally poor at thermal transmission, it can be helpful for maintaining climate control in buildings, patio decks and basements.

Although the initial cost of composite rebar is generally higher than standard steel rebar and is roughly comparable to epoxy-coated steel rebar, when considered on a lifecycle cost (LCC) basis, it can be quite economical — particularly for non-prestressed concrete applications subject to flexure, shear and compressive loadings that typically require frequent repair and maintenance or where there are other issues with metal. For all these reasons and more, composite rebar has slowly begun to gain share in the civil engineering market.

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