Fatigue Assessment of Fiber-Reinforced Concrete Using 1,200-mm Diameter Round Panels

Abstract

The fatigue performance of concrete in response to high-cycle repetitive loading is important for concrete road pavements and other concrete elements such as railway sleepers, offshore structures, and wind turbines subject to repetitive cyclic loading. Unfortunately, fatigue tests on concrete typically produce highly variable results that make it difficult to discern trends in behavior or assess the influence of selected parameters on cyclic load resistance. The majority of published fatigue performance assessments have been conducted using simply supported beams, but these result in highly variable and unreliable results. In this investigation, round panels of 1,2 mm (47 in.) diameter have been examined as a means of more reliably assessing the fatigue resistance of concrete. Cyclic tests on round concrete panels allow some redistribution of stress over relatively large cracked sections during the propagation of cracks, and thereby appear to facilitate the assessment of fatigue performance for plain and fiber-reinforced concrete with an improved degree of repeatability. Extensive data sets have indicated a standard error of approximately 4% for cyclic load resistance compared to an error at least twice this magnitude for beams.