Flexural fatigue life distributions and failure probability of steel fibrous concrete

This paper investigates the fatigue life distributions of steel fiber-reinf orced concrete (SFRC) containing different volume fractions of steel fibers for various levels of the applied fatigue stress. An extensive experimenta l investigation was planned in which 143 flexural fatigue tests and 115 com plimentary static flexural tests were conducted on SFRC specimens 100 x 100 x 500 mm in size and containing corrugated steel fibers 30 x 2.0 x 0.6 mm in size in three different volume fractions; that is,0.5 ,1.0, and 1.5%. It has been observed that the probabilistic distribution of fatigue life of S FRC, at a particular stress level S, can be approximately modeled by the tw o-parameter Weibull distribution with statistical correlation coefficient v alues exceeding 0.90. The shapes of the Weibull distribution for fatigue li fe of SFRC are different for different levels of the applied fatigue stress . The graphical method, the method of moments, and method of maximum likeli hood estimates have been used to obtain the distribution parameters of the Weibull distribution. The two-parameter Weibull distribution has been emplo yed to incorporate failure probability into the S-N relationships of SFRC.