Evaluation of Crack-Free Bridge Decks

Details

• Creators:
  Patnaik, Anil ; Ramakrishnan, V. ; Wehbe, Nadim ; Sigl, Arden
• Corporate Creators:
  South Dakota School of Mines and Technology ; South Dakota State University
• Contributors:
  Foster, John
• Corporate Contributors:
  South Dakota. Department of Transportation. Office of Research ; United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  A45 Concrete Bridge Construction Bridge Decks Constructability Cracking Evaluation And Assessment High Performance Concrete LC¬HPC Low Cracking High Performance Concrete Petrographic Evaluation Petrography

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• Publication/ Report Number:
  SD2005-11-F
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  South Dakota ; United States
• Edition:
  Final Report July 2005 to June 2011
• Corporate Publisher:
  South Dakota. Department of Transportation. Office of Research
• Abstract:
  Low cracking high performance concrete (LC-HPC) was developed in the pooled fund project TPF-5(051) at the University of Kansas. The objective of this project was to evaluate the proposed draft specifications of LC-HPC and its potential implementation in South Dakota to reduce cracking in bridge decks. As a part of the evaluation, constructability issues were studied for test slabs, A45 concrete decks, and LC-HPC decks. The results of field and laboratory tests indicated that A45 concrete and LC-HPC produced comparable properties in wet and hardened conditions. Petrographic studies on cores cut from the bridge decks included in this study revealed that the average coarse aggregate content was about 40% with a volume of permeable voids of 10.6 to 12.5%. A pair of bridges in Pennington County and another pair of bridges in Brule County were selected for the evaluation. One bridge deck in each pair was constructed using A45 concrete while the other was constructed with LC-HPC. Four sets of crack surveys were performed for each bridge deck (i) prior to the bridges being open to traffic, (ii) one year, (iii) two years and (iv) three years later. Crack densities were determined based on the crack maps corresponding to the four crack surveys for each deck. The crack densities revealed that the current SD-DOT A45 concrete decks performed nearly as well as or better than the proposed LC-HPC bridge deck. The crack densities of both decks were comparable to those obtained for several other South Dakota bridge decks and those available in published literature for other states. The study also revealed that it is feasible to implement LC-HPC in a bridge deck field environment. However, bridge decks using LC-HPC concrete are likely to cost more than the identical bridge decks made from A45. Therefore, it is recommended that more studies be conducted before considering switching from South Dakota A45 concrete to LC-HPC specifications.
• Format:
  PDF
• Funding:
  SD2005-11
• Collection(s):
  US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:629b2db3a43e8a2e1548cf43fbfe3ce79a91e796b3d3245b1b1e5ccdcd5b4037ad51dcb1ca6009b4736804d1d1216d2d1b572826da7d1503cc5c988731d9c320
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/77580/dot_77580_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 10.08 MB ]