In civil engineering, rehabilitation or strengthening of reinforced concrete structural components is a challenging issue. This issue arises periodically across the world for a variety of causes, including incorrect design or construction, rehabilitation or strengthening for increasing service loads, and others. Additionally, preventing bond failure in the lap-splice zone also requires a sufficient bond between the concrete and reinforcement along the lap-splice length. Sometimes, lap splice in the tension side has insufficient length for various reasons, such as design and construction errors. Accordingly, it is urgent that defective RC structures need strengthening to extend service life and reduce maintenance costs. This paper described the various materials and techniques that have been exploited for the rehabilitation/strengthening of existing RC structures with tension lap splices, including concrete or steel jacketing technique, fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP), external pre-stressing, near-surface mounted and fiber-reinforced composited materials. Moreover, the review aims to synthesize the data from papers and case studies around the world. This could serve as a useful reference for future studies and other researchers. Also, this paper presents a novel technique supported by an experimental program for strengthening beams with tension lab splices using the pre-stressed method and also discusses the effect of the tension lab length on flexure behavior. Finally, a descriptive statistical analysis was performed on the collected data. The proposed method generally improved the flexural strength of the tested beams by values ranging from 20 to 110%.

strengthening; tension lap splice; Reinforced Concrete Beams; deformability; crack resistance; flexural toughness