Development of Fully Prefabricated Steel-UHPC Composite Deck System

AbstractThis paper proposes a novel fully prefabricated composite deck system to achieve green and accelerated construction in bridge engineering. Ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC), which has excellent mechanical properties, was employed as the main material of the prefabricated deck. Special connecting configurations, that is, steel plates with studs or pretensioned rebar, were used for enhancing the crack resistance of the steel-UHPC interface and facilitating convenient on-site assembly. Two sets of specimens featuring passive and active crack resistance were tested for investigation of the behavior of the composite deck under negative moment. The tests showed that the fully prefabricated composite deck provided satisfactory crack resistance compared with a traditional cast-in-place construction composite deck. On the basis of physical testing, a numerical model was built with Abaqus for further parametric analysis. Several design parameters were evaluated through supplementary analyses and recommendations were made for rebar pretension force and beam stiffener height.