Investigation of a new steel-concrete connection for composite bridges

A new type of connection for steel-concrete composite bridges was developed by the Steel Structures Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Resistance to longitudinal shear is based on the development of shear stresses in the confined interfaces which form the connection. Confinement is provided by the reinforced concrete slab which encloses the connection and restrains the uplift (lateral separation) of the interfaces by developing normal stresses. The experimental investigation of the interfaces, under static and cyclic loading, enabled the development of the laws describing the structural behaviour of each interface. Those laws were presented by the authors in previous papers. The current paper focuses on the continuity of the research. It presents the experimental investigation on the new connection by means of push-out tests on specimens submitted to static and cyclic shear loading. Investigation revealed that the damage in the connection, due to cyclic loading, is expressed by the accumulation of a residual slip. A safe fatigue failure criterion is proposed for the connection which enabled the verification of the connection for the fatigue limit state with respect to the limit of fatigue. A numerical model is developed which takes into account the laws describing the interface behaviour and the analytical expressions for the confinement effect, the latter obtained by performing finite element analysis. This numerical model predicts the shear resistance of the connection and enables to assess its fatigue limit which is necessary for the fatigue design proposed.