Durability of Stress Ribbon Bridge Checked during Loading Test

Stress ribbon bridges have many advantages and became recently more popular mostly because of their versatile form, slender decks giving a light aesthetic impression and durability assured by post tensioned concrete. The paper presents the first in Poland stress Ribbon Bridge constructed last year. A static and dynamic analyse of the model is presented as well as construction solutions which were used to achieve the highest durability. The bridge was checked during static and dynamic load test. The results of this prove test were compared with results obtained from examination and study of other different bridge structures. It confirmed that the bridge has good dynamic resistance and greater stiffness than assumed in the design.

Assessment of composite failure and ultimate strength without experiment on composite

This paper attempts to estimate the ultimate strength of a laminated composite only based on its con- stituent properties measured independently. Three important issues involved have been systematically addressed, i.e., stress calculation for the constituent fiber and matrix materials, failure detection for the lamina and laminate upon the internal stresses in their constituents, and input data determination of the constituents from monolithic measurements. There are three important factors to influence the accuracy of the strength prediction. One is the stress concentration factor （SCF） in the matrix. Another is matrix plasticity. The third is thermal residual stresses in the constituents. It is these three factors, however, that have not been sufficiently well realized in the composite community. One can easily find out the elastic and strength parameters of a great many laminae and laminates in the current literature. Unfortunately, necessary information to determine the SCF, the matrix plasticity, and the thermal residual stresses of the composites is rare or incomplete. A useful design methodology is demonstrated in the paper.

Fatigue crack growth in fiber-metal laminates

Fiber-metal laminates(FMLs)consist of three layers of aluminum alloy 2024-T3 and two layers of glass/epoxy prepreg,and it(it means FMLs)is laminated by Al alloy and fiber alternatively.Fatigue crack growth rates in notched fiber-metal laminates under constant amplitude fatigue loading were studied experimentally and numerically and were compared with them in monolithic 2024-T3 Al alloy plates.It is shown that the fatigue life of FMLs is about 17 times longer than monolithic 2024-T3 Al alloy plate;and crack growth rates in FMLs panels remain constant mostly even when the crack is long,unlike in the monolithic 2024-T3 Al alloy plates.The formula to calculate bridge stress profiles of FMLs was derived based on the fracture theory.A program by Matlab was developed to calculate the distribution of bridge stress in FMLs,and then fatigue growth lives were obtained.Finite element models of FMLs were built and meshed finely to analyze the stress distributions.Both results were compared with the experimental results.They agree well with each other.