Fatigue behavior and damage mechanism of steel plate-UHPC composite bridge deck subjected to negative bending moment

Abstract

In order to investigate the fatigue behavior and failure mechanism of steel plate-UHPC composite bridge deck under hogging moment, a total of four full-scale specimens with two class of reinforcement ratio (Three specimens with reinforcement ratio of 1.58 %, 1.69 %, 1.86 %, respectively, which called longitudinal specimen. One specimen with reinforcement ratio of 0.89 %, which called transverse specimen.) were designed and tested under fatigue loading. Test results reveal that when the fatigue loading ratio was 0.25 with maximum load of 0.8 times of the static cracking load, taking the crack width of 0.10 mm as the fatigue failure criterion, the fatigue life of longitudinal specimen over 16 million cycles. However, the fatigue life of transverse specimen was only 9.08 million cycles. The longitudinal reinforcement restricts the propagation of fatigue cracks along the depth of the UHPC slab, and tensile fracture of the steel fibers occurred in the region between the top layer of longitudinal reinforcement and the UHPC surface. The fatigue damage mechanism resulting from fatigue degradation of the UHPC layer in the tension zone is identified. In addition, The fatigue design of the steel plate-UHPC composite bridge deck should be controlled by the durability rather than the strength. The established tensile S-N curve with 0.05 mm critical UHPC crack width could be used evaluate the fatigue cracking resistance of composite bridge deck.