Influence of fatigue and aggressive exposure on GFRP girder to SFRSCC deck all-adhesive connection

Abstract

To assess the influence of fatigue loading and environmental conditions on the bond behavior between Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) systems and Steel Fiber Reinforced Self-Compacting Concrete (SFRSCC) that are adhesively bonded, an experimental program composed of push-out tests was carried out. The following three scenarios were selected for the environmental conditions: natural conditions; wet–dry cycles; and temperature cycles. Half of the specimens were submitted to monotonic loading up to failure, and the other half were submitted to a fatigue load configuration of 1-million cycles and then subjected to a monotonic loading up to failure. The results have shown that for the investigated environmental conditions the GFRP–SFRSCC push-out specimens never failed up to 1 million cycles. However, temperature cycles caused a considerable reduction on the stiffness and load carrying capacity in the specimens submitted to fatigue loading, while wet–dry cycles did not modify significantly the maximum shear stress transfer in the investigated connection. This paper describes in detail the experimental program, presenting and discussing the relevant results.