Abstract
The durability of in-service reinforced concrete bridges will be greatly reduced under the action of corrosion and the repeated load such as vehicles. In this paper, six reinforced concrete beams were cast and subjected to sustained load test for one year, and then, the alternating test of corrosion and fatigue load were carried out with the damaged concrete beams. The long-term deflection, fatigue lifetime, failure modes, and crack growth were investigated under different corrosion and fatigue working conditions. The fracture section of steel bars was scanned by electron microscopy at the end of fatigue test. The results indicate that the deflection of the beams will continue to increase under a long-term load. The chloride salt in the beam has little influence on the deflection performance, but will shorten the fatigue lifetime due to the corrosion of the steel bars. Moreover, the corrosion environment can accelerate the rusting of the beam bar and reduce the fatigue lifetime, the accumulation of deflection damage and crack damage, and other fatigue characteristics. The crack initiation-propagation-fracture stage of steel bars occurs in the process of fatigue.
Highlights
Highways and railway bridges in coastal areas often bear the combined action of both complicated loads and corrosion environments, so their durability problems are increasingly outstanding [1, 2]
Studies mainly investigated the effects of sustained service loads and steel corrosion on the performance of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. e corrosion rate of reinforcements, cracking behavior, chloride permeability, loaddeflection curve, flexural stiffness, load-carrying capacity, residual flexural capacity of RC beams under various levels of sustained loading, and corrosion environments were studied [9,10,11,12,13,14]
Studies on the interaction of cyclic load and corrosive environment have mostly focused on the fatigue properties of reinforced concrete beams with corroded steel bars or coupling a corrosive environment and fatigue loading
Summary
Highways and railway bridges in coastal areas often bear the combined action of both complicated loads and corrosion environments, so their durability problems are increasingly outstanding [1, 2]. Is study mainly discussed the effects of different reinforcement corrosion and fatigue loading on the fatigue life, failure modes, crack patterns, and flexural behavior of RC beams [8, 15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. Ere are few studies on the coupling effect between fatigue load and corrosive environment In these studies, the experiment in which the fatigue load was applied to the beams while the steel bar was corroded was carried out mainly, and the steel bar corrosion method included accelerated corrosion by electricity or chloride salt immersing [23,24,25,26]. The RC beams suffered from different damages which were subjected alternating action of fatigue and corrosion environment and the tested beams were eroded by immersion in a NaCl solution wet-dry cycles. e beam deflection, the fatigue damage cumulative development, and the microscopic characteristics of the steel bar fractures were investigated, providing reference for the future study of damaged concrete beam durability
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