The purpose of the LaGuardia Runway Extension Project is to extend existing runways 4-22 and 13-31 into Flushing Bay, at the inshore end of Long Island Sound, to support Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS) - a crushable material installed at the end of each runway to reduce the risk of a plane overrun during takeoff.

The new runway deck extensions are marine concrete structures which utilize precast prestressed pile caps with a pre and post-tensioned composite precast deck and cast-in-place concrete topping slab. The concrete decks are supported by 250 ton (227 tonnes) 24 inch (61cm) diameter epoxy coated closed end concrete filled steel pipe piles with specialized wraps and sacrificial zinc anodes for corrosion protection. The piles are approximately 100 feet (30m) long and driven in about 30 feet (9m) of water through soft organic clay and dense glacial soils and founded on bedrock.

This paper provides an overall description of the runway extensions and a detailed account of both the technical and logistical challenges. Challenges included a prestressed composite deck design for both the aircraft impact and braking loads. Maintaining and replacing the lightbars of the Approach Lighting Systems (ALS) used to visually identify the runways was required, along with optimizing the pile hammer selection and driveability with wave equation analyses and dynamic pile driving PDA testing. Extensive coordination was necessary with the PANYNJ, FAA and various other stakeholders involved in this fast-paced design build project.

Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites have emerged as a lightweight and efficient repair and retrofit material for many concrete infrastructure applications. FRP can be applied to concrete using many techniques, but primarily as either externally bonded laminates or near-surface mounted bars or plates. This paper presents the results of direct shear pull-out tests performed on aged concrete specimens reinforced with glass FRP (GFRP) and carbon FRP (CFRP) externally bonded laminates and near surface mounted (NSM) bars. An accelerated aging scheme consisting of freeze/thaw cycling in the presence of a deicing salt solution is implemented to determine the effect of long-term environmental exposure on the FRP/concrete interface in regions that experience aggressive winter environments. The results show that the NSM bar technique is superior to externally bonded laminates in terms of efficiency in the use of FRP material and the effects of accelerated aging. Generally, the performance of GFRP is affected less than CFRP after freeze/thaw cycling for both externally bonded laminates and NSM bars. For high strength NSM FRP bar applications, a spalled or cracked concrete surface caused by freeze/thaw cycling may drastically reduce the capacity of the FRP/concrete interface by inducing failure at the concrete/epoxy filler interface.

A rapid repair or replacement method is developed for severely damaged concrete bridge columns due to cyclic loading. A carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) shell and headed steel bars are used to relocate the column plastic hinge. The technique employs a steel collar with steel studs to increase bond of the original column to repair concrete inside the CFRP shell. Two bridge columns were damaged including concrete crushing and longitudinal steel bar pullout under quasi-static cyclic loads. One of the specimens required additional epoxy injection of the cracks; for the other specimen, the column and cap beam were decoupled before repair to simulate replacement of a column which sustained unrepairable damage. The technique successfully relocated the plastic hinge and restored strength and displacement capacity. Failure of the repaired specimens included concrete crushing and bar fracture. The technique is an accelerated bridge construction method and could be used to repair columns with repairable damage or replace columns with unrepairable damage.

Fiber reinforced cementitious matrix (FRCM) composites have gained popularity for strengthening of concrete structures due to their capacity to overcome some drawbacks of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites, mainly related to the use of epoxy resins. Research on the topic has shown that FRCM composites can increase the axial, flexural, shear, and torsional capacity of concrete elements. However, experimental studies are still limited, and an important effort is required to develop accurate and reliable design models to predict the contribution of the system to the capacity of strengthened elements. In this paper, a quantitative review of experimental studies of axially loaded concrete elements confined with FRCM composites is presented. The influence of selected variables on the increase in axial capacity of the strengthened specimens is evaluated. Three available design models for predicting the increase in axial capacity of FRCM-strengthened concrete are assessed using a database compiled by the authors. Results show that confinement with FRCM composites can provide a significant increase in axial strength for both cylindrical and prismatic concrete specimens. Further efforts are needed to improve the performance of models to predict the axial strength and behavior of FRCM-confined concrete.

Flexural strengthening of reinforced concrete (RC) beams with fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites and two different bonding agents were investigated in this research. The bonding agents used in this research consisted of an epoxy paste and a sprayed polyurea. When polyurea was used as the bonding agent, it was sprayed to specific regions on the RC beams. Three RC beams were flexural strengthened with FRP composites according to the following techniques: (a) sprayed polyurea with and without glass FRP (GFRP) grid reinforcement, and (b) manual layup using one GFRP grid. Experimental results clearly indicate that flexural strengthening with the un-reinforced or reinforced polyurea technique is an effective strengthening scheme. Advantages of using polyurea over other epoxy based methods are that the application process requires significantly less time and the polyurea cures within minutes. Furthermore, no debonding of the un-reinforced or reinforced polyurea system was observed, suggesting a further benefit of this technique. Application of the polyurea system and key experimental results are presented and discussed herein.