The corrosion of steel reinforcement in an aging highway infrastructure is a major problem currently facing the transportation engineering community, in particular bridge engineers. In the United States, maintenance and replacement costs are measured in billions of dollars. Further, the use of deicing salts has resulted in steady deterioration of bridge decks due to corrosion. These concerns ha...

Introduction In the 1970s, exterior bonded steel reinforcement was used sporadically to reinforce bridges to attain higher service load capacities. This steel post-strengthening system consisted of steel straps bonded with epoxies to the exterior of concrete beams. An alternative to the steel retrofit is woven carbon fiber reinforced polymer fabric applied in the same manner as steel. Carbon fi...

The paper focuses on the monitoring of an experimental stretch of road over a five year period in order to measure the effects of steel reinforcement on Asphalt Concrete (AC) pavement performance. The experimental stretch of road was constructed in 2001 alternating sections with and without steel reinforcement. This paper presents the results regarding the effects of steel reinforcement that we...

With the occurrence of higher and more frequent axle loads, bridges are more solicited by fatigue loading. Bridge elements like deck slabs are subjected to a high number of stress cycles at relatively small stress magnitudes. The application of Fracture Mechanics as a useful tool for the analysis of fatigue crack growth in steel elements was demonstrated by Paris et al. in the early 1960s. With...

This paper studied the effects of reinforcement corrosion on bond performance between rebar and concrete. Tests were carried out to evaluate the degradation of bond between reinforcing steel and concrete for different corrosion levels of reinforcing steel. A series of 20 specimens of different concrete strength with various reinforcing steel corrosion levels were designed and manufactured. Each...

Addition of steel fibers to high strength concrete (HSC) improves its post-peak behavior and energy absorbing capability, which can be described well in term of toughness. This paper attempts to obtain both analytically and experimentally the efficiency of steel fibers in HSC columns with hybrid confinement of transverse reinforcement and steel fibers. Toughness ratio (TR) to quantify the confi...

Reinforced concrete beams are normally designed as under-reinforced to provide ductile behaviour at failure i.e. the tensile moment of resistance, Mt(0), is less than the moment of resistance of the compressive zone, Mc. Since it is well established that the steel in reinforced concrete beams is prone to corrosion, the residual flexural strength is normally the main concern of asset managers. H...

Reinforcement grades higher than 75 ksi (520 MPa) are not allowed in members that form plastic hinges due to a lack of information on material characteristics and on the seismic performance of columns constructed with high-strength steel (HSS) reinforcement. This research investigated the performance of reinforced concrete columns containing Grade 80 (minimum yield strength of 80 ksi [550 MPa])...

Investigations on flexural and tensile properties of GFRP laminates influenced by stainless steel wire reinforcement were carried out as a novel approach. Plain GFRP laminates and GFRP laminates reinforced with stainless steel wires at different depth with various pitch distances were fabricated by hand layup method. The composite specimens reinforced with steel wires were exposed to low freque...

The use of externally bonded Steel-Reinforced Polymer (SRP) and Steel Reinforced Grout (SRG) composites is a promising new technology for increasing the flexural and shear capacities of reinforced concrete (RC) members. The reinforcement system in these composites is a sheet made up of unidirectional cords consisting of tightly wound ultra high strength steel wires. The reinforcement can be mol...