Overview
With the occurrence of higher and more frequent axle loads on roads, in particular bridge deck slabs are more severely solicitated by fatigue loading. To avoid heavy interventions for strengthening of deck slabs, an improved building material is used, namely Ultra High Performance Fibre Reinforced Concrete with reinforcing bars (=reinforced UHPFRC), by adding a thin (3 to 5cm) layer on top of the deck slab such as to restore the required fatigue resistance and load carrying capacity.
Strengthening of bridge deck slabs using reinforced UHPFRC is a relatively gentle intervention since the bridge dead load is not increased. Also there is a potential inherent with this novel construction method to limit the duration of the working site and thus to reduce the user costs
The objective of the project is to investigate the fatigue behaviour of composite sections made of reinforced UHPFRC and reinforced concrete to deduce rules for the dimensioning of the reinforced UHPFRC layer and the corresponding fatigue safety verification.