Abstract:
To investigate the flexural fatigue behavior of post-tensioned prestressed CFRP-reinforced concrete beams, simply supported beams with both prestressed and non-prestressed longitudinal reinforcement in the tension zone made entirely of CFRP bars were designed. One static test and three constant-amplitude fatigue tests were conducted. The upper fatigue load limits
Pmax were 0.5
Pu, 0.6
Pu, and 0.7
Pu, with a lower limit Pmin of 0.1
Pu, where
Pu is the flexural capacity obtained from the static test. The test results show that the prestressed CFRP-reinforced concrete beams possess excellent fatigue performance. The specimens under
Pmax=0.5
Pu and 0.6
Pu survived over one million cycles. All failures were governed by concrete crushing in the compression zone, and neither the prestressed nor the non-prestressed CFRP bars experienced tensile fracture, indicating good deformability of the specimens. The maximum deflection, crack width, and longitudinal reinforcement strain increased with the fatigue load. For the specimen under
Pmax=0.7
Pu, the maximum deflection reached approximately 40 mm and the maximum crack width was 0.9 mm. Under the same load level, the fatigue strains in the prestressed CFRP bars, non-prestressed CFRP bars, and steel reinforcement were up to 4.6, 2.8, and 1.8 times their corresponding static strains, respectively. A calculation method for the strain non-uniformity coefficient of CFRP longitudinal reinforcement was proposed, accounting for the influence of the number of fatigue cycles and the fatigue load level (0.5
Pu-0.7
Pu). Based on this coefficient, methods for predicting the maximum crack width and deflection of prestressed CFRP-reinforced concrete beams were further developed for Pmax ranging from 0.5
Pu to 0.7
Pu. The results indicate that the proposed methods can predict the maximum crack width and deflection with reasonable accuracy.