Fatigue behavior of deep concrete beams with critical shear cracks

Reinforced concrete deep beams in bridges and other critical infrastructure are subjected to millions of load cycles during their service life. At the same time, they typically work with high shear and develop critical diagonal cracks. The cyclic loading across the cracks results in fatigue damage of the shear‐resisting mechanisms, which needs to be taken into account in the assessment of existing structures, and in particular in members with small amount of shear reinforcement built according to early design codes. To aid the development of advanced assessment approaches for such structures, this paper presents five large‐scale fatigue tests of deep beams with a stirrup ratio of 0.134%. The beams are preloaded to develop complete diagonal cracks, and then are subjected to cycles with different minimum and maximum load. The focus is placed on detailed crack measurements, needed for the development of crack‐based assessment approaches. The crack data is analyzed with the help of the two‐parameter kinematic theory to quantify important deformations. It is shown that the fatigue across the shear cracks is associated mainly with degradation of aggregate interlock and progressive damage in the critical loading zones. It is also shown that as the maximum load is decreased, the fatigue life increases, and the failure mode can switch from shear to flexure.