Flexural behavior of high-strength stainless steel wire rope reinforced ECC slabs

Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) features ultra-high ductility and multiple-cracking properties. High-strength stainless steel wire rope (HSSSWR) exhibits high tensile strength and good corrosion resistance. Taking advantage of these two materials, HSSSWR reinforced ECC (HSSSWR-ECC) promises to be attractive materials when used in flexible and ductile link slabs in the bridge deck system, permanent formwork of concrete members and strengthening of existing members. To investigate the flexural behavior of HSSSWR-ECC slabs, bending tests were performed on HSSSWR-ECC slabs with different reinforcement ratios of HSSSWRs and ECC formulas. Test results show that HSSSWR-ECC slabs exhibit excellent crack-width control and deformation capacities under bending moment. Increasing the HSSSWRs reinforcement ratio can enhance the flexural capacity of HSSSWR-ECC slabs, but would reduce the ductility. Adding thickeners in ECC could enhance the crack-width control ability and ductility of HSSSWR-ECC slabs by improving the Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) fiber dispersion in ECC, but would reduce the flexural capacity by reducing ECC strength. Calculation formulas for predicting flexural capacity of HSSSWR-ECC slabs were proposed based on related mechanics theories. The accuracy of the proposed calculation formulas was verified by comparing with test results and predicted results using the finite numerical model for HSSSWR-ECC slabs developed in this paper.