Strengthening stone arches in historical buildings with FRP

The most of the historical arches are damaged in time and require repair and strengthening. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of FRP strengthening techniques for damaged masonry arch systems. Seven single span stone arches are constructed in the laboratory. One of the arches named as reference is loaded until the occurrence of collapse to identify load carrying capacity (ultimate load). The other six arches were loaded to 75% of reference specimen's failure load in order to achieve damage to some degree. Then, four damaged arch specimens are strengthened by using only FRP strips and one specimen by FRP strips with the anchorage system and last specimen by epoxy resin by filling the joints between stone units. After applying various strengthening techniques, six stone arches were tested under a vertical point load. As a result of the study, at least 24,83% increase in the capacity of the strengthened arch specimen was identified compared with the non-strengthened reference specimen. It was also identified that only joint strengthening with epoxy resin increases the masonry arch capacity to a significant extent. In addition, no significant increase in the capacity of the arch was observed for specimens having anchorage system on the arch joints. Keywords: Masonry arches, Historical structures, Damage, FRP