Carbon Fibre Strengthening

When a slab or a beam has to carry more than it was built for, carbon fibre puts the capacity back without adding weight and without losing headroom.

Perfect Concrete Care installs carbon fibre strengthening to concrete slabs, beams, columns and walls on commercial, health, industrial and infrastructure projects across Sydney and wider New South Wales. Carbon fibre reinforced polymer, usually shortened to CFRP, is bonded to the outside of the concrete with a structural epoxy and works as external reinforcement.

Have your engineer design the strengthening. Send us the drawings and we will price it and do the work.

What Carbon Fibre Actually Does

A carbon fibre plate is a few millimetres thick and stronger in tension than steel of the same section. Bonded to the tension face of a slab or the soffit of a beam, it takes load that the internal reinforcement can no longer take on its own. You get more capacity out of the member without pouring more concrete, without steel plates and props, and without dropping the ceiling.

The trade off is that it only works if the bond works. Carbon fibre does nothing sitting on dusty, weak or contaminated concrete. The preparation and the installation records matter more than the material.

When You Need It

The jobs that come to us usually look like one of these.

• A new penetration. You cut a hole through a slab and the slab loses capacity around it. Strengthening puts it back.
• A change of use. Office becomes plant room, retail becomes gym, a carpark takes heavier vehicles. The design load goes up and the slab does not.
• New plant or equipment. Chillers, switchboards, racking or a lift installation land a load the slab was never designed for.
• A defect or a shortfall. Reinforcement short, misplaced or corroded, or a slab that has never behaved the way the drawings say it should.
• Heritage and existing structures. Where you cannot add mass or change the look of the structure, external bonding is often the only sensible option.

It Pairs With Tendon Truncation

Cutting a penetration through a post-tensioned slab means truncating tendons, and truncating a tendon removes capacity. The engineer works out how much and specifies the strengthening that replaces it. We do both halves of that job, so the crew that opens the slab is the crew that puts the capacity back, on one contract with one set of records.

Read more about tendon truncation and post-tensioned slab penetrations, or start with concrete scanning if you do not yet know what is in the slab.

How We Install It

1. Read the design. Plate type, plate width, number of layers, lap and anchorage lengths and the sequence all come from your engineer. We build to it and we query anything that does not stack up on site before we start.
2. Check the substrate. Cover meter and hammer survey to find delamination, moisture readings, and pull off testing where the design calls for a minimum tensile strength. If the concrete will not hold the bond, no amount of carbon fibre helps.
3. Repair first. Spalls, honeycombing and corroded reinforcement get repaired and cured before anything is bonded. This is our own concrete repair work, not a separate trade to coordinate.
4. Prepare and profile. Grind back to sound, clean concrete at the profile the system requires, then remove all dust. Set out is marked and checked against the drawing.
5. Bond the system. Mix by weight, apply to plate and substrate, seat the plate, roller out the excess and hold the specified adhesive thickness. Ambient and substrate temperature and humidity are recorded at the time of application.
6. Protect and hand over. Encapsulate or render as specified, then hand over the adhesion test results, the adhesive batch records, the environmental readings and progress photos.

Systems We Install

We install proprietary plate and fabric systems to the manufacturer's written procedure. We have installed Sika CarboDur S812 plate bonded with Sikadur 30 structural adhesive, which is one of the most widely specified systems in Australia. If your engineer has specified a different manufacturer, tell us at tender and we will price that system rather than talk you out of it.

Both plate bonding and wet lay-up fabric have their place. Plate suits long straight runs on slab soffits and beam tension faces. Fabric suits column wrapping, odd geometry and anywhere the shape will not take a rigid plate.

What We Do Not Do

We do not design the strengthening and we do not certify it. Your structural engineer specifies the system, the layout and the anchorage, and signs off the result. We install it properly and give you the records to prove it. If you need an engineer, we can point you at ones we have worked with.

That is deliberate. An installer who also sells the design has a reason to specify more of it. We would rather be the contractor your engineer is happy to hand the work to.

Why Choose Perfect Concrete Care

• One contractor for the whole chain. Scanning, cutting, coring, repair and strengthening sit in the same business, so nobody is waiting on somebody else's crew.
• Records that survive a review. Adhesion tests, batch numbers, environmental readings and photos, handed over as a pack rather than dug up six months later.
• Built for live sites. Occupied buildings, health, staged handovers and night work. We are used to working around people rather than waiting for an empty site.
• Part of Perfect Group. Fifteen years of concrete and demolition work behind the crew, with the insurance, licences and management systems a head contractor expects to see.

Areas We Service in Sydney and New South Wales

Sydney metropolitan, the Central Coast, Newcastle and the Hunter, Wollongong and the Illawarra, and regional New South Wales where the job justifies the travel. Our Queensland office covers Brisbane and South East Queensland.

Carbon Fibre Strengthening by Location

We have a page for each area we cover most, with the local number and the team that runs the job. Carbon fibre strengthening in Sydney, Wollongong, Newcastle, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast.

Request Carbon Fibre Strengthening

Send through the engineer's design and we will come back with a price and a programme. If the design is not finished yet, send what you have and we will tell you what else we need to price it properly.