Experimental Study on the Impact Fatigue Behavior of GFRP Mesh Reinforced ECC for Runway Pavement Application

Abstract

Concrete pavement is easy to crack and generate the chunks, which may destroy the engine of the airplane and maintenance cost is very expensive. Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) is ductile with microcracks, but its strength is low. Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) mesh imbedded in ECC could improve the strength. This paper investigates the impact fatigue behaviour of ECC and GFRP mesh reinforced ECC under 5 different impact pressures (1.61 MPa, 1.88 MPa, 2.10 MPa, 2.41 MPa and 3.60 MPa), the concrete specimens were also tested for comparison. The pulse velocity through the specimens was also tested to analyse the damage of the specimens. The experimental results show that GFRP mesh reinforced ECC has improved impact fatigue behaviour than ECC specimens. The concrete specimens were all broken after a few impacts, but the GFRP mesh reinforced ECC specimens were all not broken after impacted for 30000 times. The impact fatigue behaviour of ECC reinforced with two layers of GFRP mesh with a grid dimension of 10 mm was the best, which is a desirable pavement composite comparing to the ordinary concrete and ECC without reinforcements.