Performance of a fibre-reinforced polymer bridge deck under dynamic wheel loading

Vibration-based monitoring of an FRP footbridge with embedded fiber-Bragg gratings: Influence of temperature vs. damage

“…However, the influence of an actual damage scenario could not be investigated in the same manner as destructive testing was not permitted. Detachment or debonding between different components as a result of delamination or of adhesive failure of bonded joints caused by fatigue or other factors, such as impact loading, is a type of damage that can occur on FRP structures [46,47,48,61,62,63,64] and is hard to identify, since these are typically internal defects that are not visible at the surface of the structure but might in time lead to inadequate performance due to growth of the defect. Therefore, structural damage in the form of full detachment between different components of the deck is simulated in a digital-twin model in order to investigate the influence of detachment on the dynamic characteristics of the bridge.…”

“…FRP structures have become quite popular in the recent decades also in bridge engineering due to the advantages they offer in terms of weight-to-strength and weight-to-stiffness ratio as well as chemical and corrosion resistance [46,47,48]. One of the main challenges that composite structures face is the difficulty to detect and localize damage in an early stage due to the nature of the induced damage.…”

Nonlinear behaviour of pultruded decks due to morphing of tyre loads

“…In order to investigate this issue, prior experimental studies have used rectangular-in-plan, flat soffit steel plates faced on the deck with pads of various materials including rubber [7,9,16,24], neoprene [4,17], elastomeric material [25], timber [20], cork [24] and steel-reinforced rubber on neoprene [4]. In other cases, no pad material was used, so that the load was transmitted to the deck's top surface directly from steel plates [13,18] or steel beams [18].…”

Bi-axial behaviours of abraded and rehabilitated FRP decks as anisotropic plates under concentrated wheel loading

“…These fractures propagate and eventually breach the deck's outer protective resin layer, allowing moisture ingress from the deck's surface which exacerbates degradation [27]. Good computational and experimental representation of the tyre load in 3D, so as to properly capture this effect, has been a subject of previous studies [27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

“…Prior studies on GFRP decks have tackled this issue by using short lengths of deck which are easily gauged internally [1,3,28,31,33], or by carefully protecting gauges on the outer surfaces [3,11,27,30], or by placing gauges on internal surfaces near the edges of the deck, where there is uninhibited access to those surfaces, and then applying the tyre loads also in those edge zones [32].…”