Bridges

The span length and general size of bridges across the Queensland road Network have increased substantially in recent years. This has led to the development of larger girder section sizes, along with the requirement to provide increased amounts of reinforcement in the end zones of bridge beams and units. This often results in reinforcement congestion and reduced quality of placed concrete in the end zones, creating durability issues and structural performance concerns. Concrete practitioners have begun to investigate the increased practicality and productivity of using self-consolidating concrete (SCC) to overcome these issues.

This paper provides a critical review of current literature that has informed the development of a planned research program to investigate whether the use of SCC impacts on the structural behaviour and theoretical shear capacity of members. The proposed research includes a comparison with typical conventional concrete used for precast elements.

This paper discusses the results of experimental investigations undertaken by various authors focusing on a range of self-consolidating concrete shear results. The published literature reports results of SCC reinforced beams having a reduction in structural shear performance (1), through to the results published by Hegger et al. (2) indicating that SCC does not significantly influence the shear capacity of prestressed beams. This paper also discusses the material properties, including creep, shrinkage, and modulus of elasticity of SCC, and compares these with conventional concrete.

This paper outlines the planned research program to evaluate the shear response of beams manufactured using self-consolidating concrete. This will determine the whether the current Codified design models are adequate to predict the shear strength of self-consolidating concrete. The focus of the planned research is to ensure that bridge beams are not under the theoretical strength when assessing their structural capacity for future loading requirements.