Fatigue analysis of partly damaged RC slabs repaired with overlaid UHPFRC

Due to repetitive traffic loadings and environmental attacks, reinforced concrete (RC) bridge deck slabs are suffering from severe degradation, which makes structural repairing an urgency. In this study, the fatigue performance of an RC bridge deck repairing technique using ultra-high performance fiber reinforcement concrete (UHPFRC) overlay is assessed experimentally with a wheel-type loading set-up as well as analytically based on finite element method (FEM) using a crack bridging degradation concept. In both approaches, an original RC slab is firstly preloaded to achieve a partly damaged RC slab which is then repaired with UHPFRC overlay and reloaded. The results indicate that the developed analytical method can predict the experimental fatigue behaviors including displacement evolutions and crack patterns reasonably well. In addition, as the shear stress in the concrete/UHPFRC interface stays relatively low over the calculations, this interface can be simply simulated as perfect. Moreover, superior to the experiments, the numerical method provides fatigue behaviors of not only the repaired but also the unrepaired RC slabs. Due to the high strengths and cracking resistance of UHPFRC, the repaired slab exhibited a decelerated deterioration rate and an extended fatigue life compared with the unrepaired slab. Therefore, the proposed repairing scheme can afford significant strengthen effects and act as a reference for future practices and engineering applications.