Industrial Structural Retrofit

Project Overview

The project is a factory building — a tall, open-span industrial facility with a reinforced-concrete frame, exposed concrete walls, and large glazed openings. 

Current Structural Problems

As is common in active industrial plants, production requirements had outgrown the original design of the structure:

• Slabs short on capacity and stiffness. Evolving production layouts brought higher floor loads — equipment, materials, and operational traffic — beyond what the original slabs were designed to carry. Floor plates needed more capacity and more stiffness to serve the upgraded production use.

• Beams short on flexural and shear capacity. The frame beams span the large open bays of the factory floor. Under the increased loads transferred from the strengthened slabs, their flexural and shear capacity fell short of what current verification required.

• A working building, not a greenfield site. Strengthening had to proceed inside an industrial building where space, schedule, and access all mattered — ruling out heavy, intrusive techniques.

The Strengthening Scopes

1. Slabs — full-coverage CFRP fabric

Slab soffits were strengthened with CFRP fabric applied in a bidirectional grid across the full floor area — the dark grid clearly visible across the entire slab in the project photos, with fabric strips running in both directions and anchor patches at their intersections. Full-area fabric works together with the concrete as a tension skin: it raises the slab's flexural capacity and overall stiffness, and distributes the effect evenly across the whole floor plate rather than concentrating it at isolated strips.

2. Frame beams — longitudinal sheets + U-wraps

Frame beams were strengthened with the classic CFRP combination, visible in the photos as the dark reinforcement running along the beams:

Longitudinal CFRP sheets bonded to the beam soffits restore flexural capacity along the span;

U-shaped wraps on the beam sides add shear resistance and confine the end zones, forming the familiar grid pattern where they cross the longitudinal sheets.

After Strengthening

The factory building's floor system is now fully aligned with its production demands:

• Slab capacity and stiffness upgraded across the full floor area, with no measurable loss of interior space;

• Beam flexural and shear capacity restored by the combined longitudinal-and-U-wrap layout;

• The entire scope delivered from mobile platforms, leaving the factory floor unobstructed and the program on schedule;

Have a Similar Project? Talk to Us.

Horse Construction is a Shanghai-based manufacturer of structural strengthening materials, with two full product lines trusted on industrial and infrastructure projects in 100+ countries:

Carbon fiber systems — CFRP fabric, CFRP laminates, pre-stressed CFRP laminate systems, carbon rebars and tendons, with matched saturating epoxies;

Structural adhesives — steel-bonding adhesive, rebar-planting adhesive, crack injection and pouring adhesives, and segment joint adhesive.

If your project involves factory buildings, industrial facilities, or similar strengthening work, contact us — we will do everything we can to support you, from material selection to on-time delivery.