Shear Fatigue Response of Cracked Concrete Interface

Abstract

The shear fatigue behavior of cracked concrete interface was experimentally investigated on a single crack plane to quantify the degree of deterioration per load cycle. A simple experimental setup was used, in which a finite lateral stiffness was provided to the crack interface by using unbonded steel bars. The effects of loading amplitude, loading pattern and water exposure were examined. Time-dependent behavior of shear transfer under sustained shear load was also investigated. The shear fatigue response of cracked concrete interface was found to be characterized by gradual increments of shear slip and dilation and majority of the incremental displacements to occur in the first few cycles. The degree of deterioration was found to be highly sensitive to the load amplitude level and loading pattern. The relative extent of deterioration in the case of reversed cyclic loading was much larger than that of single-sided fatigue loading. Worse yet, the downward flow of water through the crack interface was found to accelerate the shear fatigue degradation. The experimental results are summarized and a simplified phenomenological model is proposed to quantify the degeneration of shear stiffness in terms of intrinsic accumulated normalized slip with respect to crack opening.

Investigating the Mechanism of Shear Fatigue in Reinforced Concrete Beams subjected to Pulsating and Moving Loads using Digital Image Correlation

“…Through a parametric study, it was shown that the reduction in the fatigue life of bridge decks is attributed to shear fatigue phenomenon on crack interfaces. The reduction is particularly significant when water is present in the cracks [1,12], which is consistent with the observations by [13]. Gebreyouhannes performed shear fatigue simulations on reinforced concrete beams with and without web reinforcement under both pulsating and moving loads [14].…”

Rapid Degradation of Concrete Anchorage Performance by Liquid Water

“…However, when liquid water is present and water advection occurs, fine fragments are transported away from their original location to other locations as the result of liquid water advection, and new intact surfaces are constantly exposed to the mechanical action from the base plate. The decrease of shear transfer through washout has already been pointed out in another study (Gebreyouhannes et al 2008), and a similar mechanism is considered to be at work in the present experiment, promoting breakdown.…”

“…The causal mechanisms have been variously identified as reduction in compressive strength due to changes in surface energy (Gilkey 1926;Matsushita 1984;Matsushita and Onoue 2006), the cracked surface washout effect (Gebreyouhannes et al 2008), the wedge effect (Slowik and Saouma 2000), and cavitation (Maekawa and Fujiyama 2013), among other things, yet the influence of water on this anchorage performance has not been fully elucidated. A case similar to the damage discussed here was reported by Matsuda in a study on the concrete around bridge supports degrading into a mud pumping state and the estimation of the mechanism (Matsuda 2013), but that study have gone no futher the shortening the quantitative analysis required for the actual design and operation taking into account the influence of the above on structural performance deterioration.…”

Inelastic Performance of High-Strength Concrete Bridge Columns under Earthquake Loads

“…If we consider the more detailed behavior of the contact surface, such as frictional stress, change of inclination, and permanent damage of contact unit, in modeling the constitutive relation of local contact stress, a more sophisticated shear transfer model can be obtained (Gebreyouhannes et al 2008). However, such rigorous numerical work is too expensive to be directly implemented at the inner loop of nonlinear analysis.…”