THE EFFECT OF CONCRETE BOND ON THE STRESS INTENSITY FACTORS FOR AN EDGE CRACK IN A REINFORCING BAR

Abstract— The stress intensity factors at the tip of an edge crack in a round bar embedded in the tension zone of a concrete beam are found for several conditions of bond failure between the steel reinforcing bar and the concrete. A two-dimensional finite element technique is modified to represent the third dimension, the steel-concrete interface and debonding. The integrated form of the Paris crack growth law is used with the calculated stress intensity factors to compute the propagating fatigue lives for embedded bar and bar in air. The results indicate that embedded bars appear to have shorter fatigue propagation lives than bars in air if the crack initiators are less than 0.05 of the bar diameter, while for deeper crack initiators, the opposite is true. It has also been shown that the propagating fatigue life of the bar increases with the degree of bond.