Full-scale testing of a fibre-reinforced concrete footbridge

The design, testing and construction of a 33·6 m pre-stressed drop-in girder made with Ductal ultra-high performance fibre-reinforced concrete is presented. This girder was part of a pedestrian bridge that required the largest known volume of this material cast in a single pour at the time of production. The girder was post-tensioned and utilised stainless steel rebar at its ends as well as non-corrosive glass fibre reinforced polymer rebar as passive reinforcement. A two-day 90°C steam cure was performed prior to testing. Embedded thermocouples, load cells and displacement transducers were used to instrument two simply supported tests. In the first test, 90% of the factored load was applied, first symmetrically over the top of the slab and secondly eccentrically over half of the top of the slab. The results show that the measured self-weight was close to predicted and displacements were smaller than predicted with full recovery upon load removal, indicating no inelastic behaviour. No cracking was observed during testing or after installation.