Fatigue strength of steel fibre reinforced concrete in flexure

The paper presents a study on the fatigue strength of steel fibre reinforced concrete (SFRC). An experimental programme was conducted to obtain the fatigue-lives of SFRC at various stress levels and stress ratios. Sixty seven SFRC beam specimens of size 500 x 100 x 100 mm were tested under four-point flexural fatigue loading. Fifty four static flexural tests were also conducted to determine the static flexural strength of SFRC prior to fatigue testing. The specimens incorporated 1.5% volume fraction of corrugated steel fibres of size 0.6 x 2.0 x 30 mm. Concept of equivalent fatigue-life, reported for plain concrete in literature, is applied to SFRC to incorporate the effects of stress level S, stress ratio R and survival probability L-R into the fatigue equation. The results indicate that the statistical distribution of equivalent fatigue-life of SFRC is in agreement with the two-parameter Weibull distribution. The coefficients of the fatigue equation have been determined corresponding to different survival probabilities so as to predict the flexural fatigue strength of SFRC for the desired level of survival probability. (C) 2002 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.