Effect of Fiber Diameter on Fatigue Strength of Fiber Reinforced Concrete and its Design

This paper describes the effect of fiber diameter of fiber reinforced concrete (FRC) under fatigue behavior and its design method. Some researchers showed that the fatigue behavior of FRC is mainly governed by the bridging stress degradation, but little information is still available so far. We conducted fatigue tensile experiments of the FRC under constant strain amplitude first and the degradation of bridging stress was measured experimentally. Then, the micromechanics-based theoretical model is also developed, and the model is verified by the test results. The model accounts for the loss of fatigue ruptured fibers of which fatigue rupture is based on S-N relationships. The parametric study from the micromechanics-based theoretical model indicates that the best fiber diameter varies according to the number of cycles and strain level applied to the FRC specimen. The result suggests that we need to design FRC with considering the application and its loading conditions to utilize the capacity of FRC.