Article Anchor Plates Bonded on Reinforced Concrete: A Preliminary Experimental Investigation Andrea Nino Consiglio and Giovanni Muciaccia *   Citation: Consiglio, A.N.; Muciaccia, G. Anchor Plates Bonded on Reinforced Concrete: A Preliminary Experimental Investigation. CivilEng 2021, 2, 385–395. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/civileng2020021 Academic Editors: Akanshu Sharma and Domenico Asprone Received: 26 February 2021 Accepted: 15 May 2021 Published: 19 May 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, P.zza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 20133 Milan, Italy; andreanino.consiglio@polimi.it * Correspondence: giovanni.muciaccia@polimi.it Abstract: During the last decades, different technologies to anchor steel elements in concrete were proposed. The present work presents the results of a preliminary investigation of a new connection characterized by single steel plates that are directly bonded on concrete surfaces. The anchor response was experimentally investigated under both tension and shear actions. Specific conditions influencing the behavior of the bonded assembly were discussed, with particular reference to the presence of cracks and crack cycling in concrete. Keywords: bonding on concrete; bonding agent; anchor plate; bonded assembly 1. Introduction Nowadays, thinking about energy production is a synonym of thinking about how to produce more energy with less input. The solution to this complex equation is the life extension of the existing facilities as per nuclear ones. Hence, the nuclear industry has been looking for non-intrusive and medium-duty fasteners to enable the maintenance of existing assets while saving time and reducing operational costs. Under such a perspective, a solution consists in adopting surface-bonded connection; plates or additional reinforcement can be bonded by an adhesive to hardened concrete. In general, bonding steel plates to reinforced concrete element was investigated as supple- mentary bending [1] or shear [2] reinforcement, also focusing on the influence of glued plates on stiffness, cracking, and ultimate capacity of strengthened members [3]. However, to the authors’ knowledge, no public result is currently available regarding bonded plates used to transfer tensile or shear actions from an attached element to a reinforced concrete element. In this frame of work, COLD PAD and Électricité de France (EDF) co-developed and patented a non-intrusive composite and fastener bonded “on” concrete rather “in” concrete, called C-BLOCKTM. This innovative fastener should be used for permanent applications. This paper presents the results of a first exploratory test campaign performed by COLD PAD and EDF jointly with Politecnico di Milano, discussing the potentiality of such a fastening technique. 2. Materials and Methods 2.1. Test Specimens Three different specimens with the same plate geometry (Figure 1) but different interface geometries (Figure 2) were considered: • Type A: steel fastener with no intermediate deformation layer (IDL); • Type B: steel fastener with a simple IDL; • Type C: steel fastener with a cellular IDL. CivilEng 2021, 2, 385–395. https://doi.org/10.3390/civileng2020021 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/civileng