Finite Element Bond Modeling for Indented Wires in Pretensioned Concrete Crossties Available to Purchase

Indented wires have been increasingly employed by concrete crosstie manufacturers to improve the bond between prestressing steel reinforcements and concrete, as bond can affect several critical performance measures, including transfer length, splitting propensity and flexural moment capacity of concrete ties. While extensive experimental testing has been conducted at Kansas State University (KSU) to obtain bond characteristics of about a dozen commonly used prestressing wires, this paper develops macro-scale or phenomenological finite element bond models for three typical wires with spiral or chevron indent patterns. The steel wire-concrete interface is homogenized and represented with a thin layer of cohesive elements sandwiched between steel and concrete elements. The cohesive elements are assigned traction-displacement constitutive or bond relations that are defined in terms of normal and shear stresses versus interfacial dilatation and slip within the elasto-plastic framework. A yield function expressed in quadratic form of shear stress and linear form of normal stress is adopted. The yield function takes into account the adhesive mechanism and hardens in the post-adhesive stage. The plastic flow rule is defined such that the plastic dilatation evolves with the plastic slip. The mathematical forms of the yield and plastic flow functions are the same for all three wire types, but the bond parameters are specific for each wire. The adhesive, hardening and dilatational bond parameters are determined for each wire type based on untensioned pullout tests and pretensioned prism tests conducted at KSU. Simulation results using these bond models are further verified with surface strain data measured on actual concrete crossties made with the three respective prestressing wires at a tie manufacturing plant.