Designing and Testing of Concrete Bridge Decks Reinforced with Glass FRP Bars

Abstract

In addition to their high strength and light weight, fiber-reinforced polymer ͑FRP͒ composite reinforcing bars offer corrosion resistance, making them a promising alternative to traditional steel reinforcing bars in concrete bridge decks. FRP reinforcement has been used in several bridge decks recently constructed in North America. The Morristown Bridge, which is located in Vermont, United States, is a single span steel girder bridge with integral abutments spanning 43.90 m. The deck is a 230 mm thick concrete continuous slab over girders spaced at 2.36 m. The entire concrete deck slab was reinforced with glass FRP ͑GFRP͒ bars in two identical layers at the top and the bottom. The bridge is well instrumented at critical locations for internal temperature and strain data collection with fiber-optic sensors. The bridge was tested for service performance using standard truck loads. The construction procedure and field test results under actual service conditions revealed that GFRP rebar provides very good and promising performance.

Fatigue Behavior of Concrete Bridge Decks Cast on GFRP Stay-in-Place Structural Forms

“…FRP composite bars have shown satisfactory laboratory results as reinforcement for a concrete deck slab and bridge barrier wall prototypes (El-Salakawy et al, 2003a;El-Salakawy and Benmokrane, 2004). Also, GFRP reinforcing bars have been utilized in the field for several bridge decks that have been recently designed and constructed in North America (El-Salakawy and Benmokrane, 2003;El-Salakawy et al, 2003b;Benmokrane et al, 2006). The purpose of these field applications was to help validate and improve existing design codes and guidelines, establish construction details, and evaluate the performance of FRP bars under actual traffic loading and environmental conditions.…”

Static behavior of RC deck slabs partially prestressed with hybrid fiber reinforced polymer tendons

“…Bridge decks reinforced with fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) tendons have been widely investigated and applied over the past 20 years . Moreover, the design and construction methods of FRP‐RC bridge deck slabs are proposed in the existing literature . Because of the relatively low stiffness of FRP composites, especially GFRP, RC members reinforced with FRP based on the equivalent strength principle exhibit larger deflections and crack widths than the conventional steel‐reinforced members .…”

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] Moreover, the design and construction methods of FRP-RC bridge deck slabs are proposed in the existing literature. 10,11 Because of the relatively low stiffness of FRP composites, especially GFRP, RC members reinforced with FRP based on the equivalent strength principle exhibit larger deflections and crack widths than the conventional steel-reinforced members. 1,12 Consequently, the design of bridge decks reinforced with FRP composites is controlled by serviceability limit state rather than ultimate limit state.…”

Evaluation of calculation methods used for estimating the ultimate moment resistance of bridge decks reinforced with frp bars

“…However, field tests of functioning bridges show that with a proper design of constructions, their deflections do not exceed the permissible ones. Deformability is influenced by the strength of concrete, the height of cross-section, the percentage of reinforcement (Benmokrane et al 2004;Benmokrane et al 2006;El-Ragaby et al 2007).…”