Partial-interactive behaviour of steel–concrete members under static and fatigue loadings

Abstract

This paper deals with the static and fatigue behaviour according to the partial interaction of steel–concrete composite members. To examine these, a steel–concrete composite bridge deck, which was designed so that it could have higher structural performance and lower deck depth in comparison with the conventional cast-in-place concrete deck, was fabricated as static flexural test and fatigue test specimens having various degrees of interaction. The results of the static flexural tests were compared with those of structural partial-interaction analysis. Based on the results of these, the static and fatigue behaviour characteristics to the partial interaction were examined and several conclusions were drawn. The structural partial-interaction behaviour can be efficiently and effectively predicted by the partial-interaction analysis, and this may be attributed to the potential advantage of the proposed method over the conventional method. For the fatigue design, the assumption of the full interaction leads to the over-estimate for the fatigue life, and the partial-interaction approach is more practical for fatigue.