| Summary: | Steel orthotropic and reinforced concrete bridge decks experience costly serviceability problems from fatigue and de-icing salts. Pultruded glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) cellular decks show great promise as a means of tackling these concerns. However uptake of GFRP decks is slow, partly due to limited understanding of key structural facets (including fatigue degradation of GFRP decks under repeated tyre loading) of the resulting new bridge forms. This thesis addresses these shortcomings through extensive experimental and finite element studies, including the construction of an 8 m long, 3.65 m wide full-scale laboratory bridge specimen comprising cellular GFRP decking adhesively bonded across three pre-tensioned concrete beams. From the experiments, the mechanics of Plying of the bonded deck-to-beam connections were elucidated and shown to be a potential concern for the concrete near the bond line. Polymer concrete surfacing applied to the deck was observed to significantly reduce the local patch load-induced strains, whilst also altering the contact mechanics between the loader and the flexible decking. FE modelling reliably predicted these experimentally-observed mechanics.
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