Structural Behaviour of a CFRP-prestressed Railway Bridge Prototype
OPEN ACCESS
Loading...
Author / Producer
Date
2025
Publication Type
Journal Article
ETH Bibliography
yes
OPEN ACCESS
Data
Rights / License
Abstract
This paper discusses the structural behaviour of a 6.5 m long and 1.7 m wide CFRP-prestressed, steel-reinforced concrete railway bridge prototype consisting of four pretensioned longitudinal girders, three pretensioned transverse girders and a deck slab. The prototype test covered key aspects of the structural behaviour of railway bridges in terms of (i) serviceability and fatigue, both related to the prestress efficiency and the behaviour in cyclic loading and (ii) the ultimate limit state, where the presence of the brittle CFRP challenges established design and verification concepts which presume ductile reinforcement. The specimen was loaded in four-point bending with a transverse eccentricity, including a total of 60 000 load cycles at three different load levels and the subsequent loading to failure. Yielding of the reinforcing steel first occurred at approximately 73% of the ultimate load and propagated to significant parts of the bending tensile zones of three out of four longitudinal girders before failure occurred due to concrete crushing in the deck slab. This failure mechanism did not lead to a brittle collapse of the system. Instead, deformations kept increasing at the approximately constant peak load. Distributed fibre optical strain measurements, primarily along the reinforcing steel, allowed for detailed insight into the load-bearing behaviour.
Permanent link
Publication status
published
External links
Editor
Book title
Journal / series
Volume
Pages / Article No.
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
Geographic location
Date collected
Date created
Subject
bridge engineering; prefabrication; CFRP-prestressing; stainless steel; cyclic loading; distributed fibre optical sensing; digital image correlation
Organisational unit
09469 - Kaufmann, Walter / Kaufmann, Walter