Innovative composite deck slab for railway bridges: Experimental investigations on the fatigue resistance of the dowel strips

Abstract

ABSTRACTAt TU Wien, Institute of Structural Engineering, Research Centre of Steel Structures, a new, extremely slender steel‐concrete‐steel composite (SCSC) plate is under investigation to meet the requirements of today's standards related to the geometric conditions and noise emission in the substitution of old railway bridges. The multi‐layer structure of the plate consists of two steel cover plates with an unreinforced concrete core, hence the name sandwich plate. Perforated shear connectors, welded alternately to only one of the outer steel plates, work together to ensure the transmission of the shear flow between the outer plates, by the activation of diagonal concrete compression struts between neighboring dowel bars. After the examination of the static load‐bearing capacity in former research programs (1), the current investigations are focussed on the fatigue behaviour of the SCSC plate, whereby the main focus lies on the investigation of the relation between the amplitude of the traffic load and the bearable number of load cycles of the SCSC plate till crack initiation in the shear connectors.A detailed description of the numerical modelling of the SCSC plate using the Abaqus/Explicit (2) software and the calculation of the fatigue life of the dowel strips using the notch strain concept are described in (3; 4; 5). This paper gives an overview of the planning, execution and evaluation of the experimental investigations and compares the experimental and the numerical results regarding the fatigue life of the dowel strip.