Considerable research has been conducted over the last decade or so on the strengthening or repair of existing reinforced concrete (RC) structural elements such as beams, columns and slabs with externally bonded fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composites. Surprisingly, by comparison, very little research has been conducted on the strengthening of RC beam-column connections with FRP composites. The majority of research on connection strengthening has been experimental to date which is scattered in various journals and conference proceedings. Considerably less research has been published on numerical modelling (e.g. finite element modelling) and analytical modelling (e.g. strut and tie, and compatibility of stress and strain models) as well as the performance of these models when assessed against experimental data. Some design recommendations have been proposed although they are no where near as comprehensive as recommendations
for the FRP-strengthening of other elements such as beams, columns and slabs. In this paper, the results of a finite element (FE) investigation on RC connections strengthened with FRP are reported and compared with test data. The study shows that the FE approach is able to capture the overall behaviour of the test specimens although some short comings of the analytical method are highlighted.