Mechanical behavior of adhesive anchors under high temperature exposure: Experimental investigation

The improvement in mechanical and adhesion properties of polymer resins have allowed to progressively substitute cast-in place rebars by polymer-based anchors in some applications, by providing equivalent or even higher mechanical properties at ambient temperature. However, a temperature increase has the effect of weakening the bond and leads to a significant decay in the bearing capacity of the adhesive anchors. This paper presents a study of the phenomena that occur at high temperature in an adhesive anchor when exposed to high temperatures by means of two pull-out test procedures and by thermomechanical characterization of the polymer resin. Results showed that the resin glass transition is the responsible for the decay in the fire resistance of adhesive anchors. The paper highlights the non-conservative aspect of the current design method used to calculate the fire resistance of chemical anchors and proposes to consider the pull-out curves as input data.