| The use of precast concrete panels as a decking system on highway bridges is not a new idea. Since the late 1960's research has been performed and bridges have been built using the concept of a prefabricated bridge deck. However, the concept has not been universally accepted by the bridge industry, and the majority of new bridges built today still use traditional cast-in-place concrete decks. In recent years, the bridge industry has been trying to improve the way bridges are built by using state-of-the-art technologies and practices to provide better quality bridges that can be constructed over a shorter period of time without significant impact to the general public. The controlled environment and automation of modern precast plants results in concrete products having higher strength, more consistent quality and greater durability than can be achieved in field placed and cured concrete operations. It is the objective of this research to develop a new full depth precast bridge deck system that utilizes a state-of-the-art technology to improve the quality of the system. The new system uses carbon fiber grid, C-Grid, to reinforce and pretension the panels.;C-Grid is a light weight, non-corrosive concrete reinforcing material developed by TechFab, LLC. It is relatively new to the structural engineering industry, which required initial tests to be performed to determine properties of the C-Grid. Once the tensile capacity of the C-Grid was determined, a gripping mechanism was developed and a prestress test was performed. It was found that the C-Grid could be used to pretension a concrete panel.;Details were developed for the proposed full depth precast concrete bridge deck system that uses C-Grid as the pretensioning material. Many of the details of the proposed system are modified details from an existing precast concrete bridge deck system that has been researched and used in practice. Based on the parameters of the proposed system, design calculations were performed to determine the flexural capacity of the proposed system. It was determined that the proposed system requires a greater flexural capacity in order to support the loads required by code. This could be achieved by increasing the tensile capacity of the C-Grid. |
