Through-thickness performance of adhesive connections between FRP bridge decks and steel main girders

FRP bridge decks offer several advantages compared with conventional concrete bridge decks, particularly their much lower weight, but also their resistance against corrosion as well as easier installation and maintenance. The poorly conceived methods available for connecting FRP bridge decks with their supporting structures – normally steel girders – nonetheless constitute a disadvantage. Connections involving studs or bolts are not appropriate in this case, since FRP is a very brittle material that offers no ductile properties. Bolted connections usually result in much higher stress concentrations, while adhesive bonding is a more material-adapted connection method since larger surfaces can be linked together, thus ensuring reduced stresses. The bridge system investigated in this thesis consists of a pultruded FRP bridge deck bonded to steel main girders, the bridge's main structural components, which have to transmit the dead and traffic loads to the supports, whereas the bridge deck is spanned in the transverse direction perpendicular to the steel girders. Uplift forces caused by the load-bearing behavior of the bridge deck transverse to the bridge axis lead to through-thickness tensile stresses in the adhesive joint. The main objective of this thesis is the description of the structural behavior in the transverse direction. This includes analysis of the stresses in the adhesive connection as well as determination of the strength of the joints. Analytical and experimental investigations were carried out. It was shown, that the tensile stress distribution in the adhesive joint is non-uniform with high stress concentrations below the FRP deck webs of the cellular deck and above the steel girder web. Alternately inclined deck webs thereby induce significantly higher stresses below the vertical webs. A method for the calculation of the stress state in the adhesive layer is proposed which is validated by numerical and experimental results. The material strength of the connection in terms of a combination of tensile through-thickness and shear stresses is established. The total safety factor of the joint was higher than the safety factor of the FRP deck for bending between the main girders. A possible failure process would not start in the adhesive connection between bridge deck and steel girder which eventually could lead to additional failure of other structural members. The system is redundant. Fatigue loading up to 10 million cycles showed no stiffness degradation. The results of this thesis prove the existence of a good load-bearing behavior under static and fatigue loads of adhesively-bonded joints between pultruded FRP bridge decks and structural steel girders, where the adhesive connection is loaded with uplift forces and moments acting in the bridge deck, in addition to the shear in the connection layer due to composite action. The basis for a design method for adhesively-bonded connections between pultruded FRP bridge decks and steel girders is provided.