Shear Fatigue of Prestressed Concrete Beams

The increasing traffic leads to higher requirements on the load-bearing capacity of existing bridges. In this context the shear resistance is of special interest. As part of a research project, tests on

I-shaped prestressed concrete beams (h = 0,7 m; l = 6,5 m) without shear reinforcement and with low shear reinforcement ratios under cyclic loading have been performed. The test beams and investigated load regimes were defined referring to the conditions of existing bridges. The present paper describes the tests on beams without shear reinforcement. It is shown, that the beams can sustain more load cycles than predicted by current approaches for shear fatigue.