Influence of fatigue and aggressive exposure on GFRP girder to SFRSCC deck all-adhesive connection

Abstract

To assess the influence of fatigue loading and environmental conditions on the bond behavior between glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) systems and steel fiber reinforced self-compacting concrete (SFRSCC) that are adhesively bonded, an experimental program composed of push-out tests was carried out. The following three scenarios were selected for the environmental conditions: natural conditions; wet-dry cycles; and temperature cycles. Half of the specimens were submitted to monotonic loading up to failure, and the other half were submitted to a fatigue load configuration of 1-million cycles and then subjected to a monotonic loading up to failure. The results have shown that for the investigated environmental conditions the GFRP-SFRSCC push-out specimens never failed up to 1 million cycles. However, temperature cycles caused a considerable reduction on the stiffness and load carrying capacity in the specimens submitted to fatigue loading, while wet-dry cycles did not modify significantly the maximum shear stress transfer in the investigated connection. This paper describes in detail the experimental program, presenting and discussing the relevant results.