An investigation on the fatigue performance of cracked steel plates reinforced with FRP and stop hole

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Abstract

In this paper, we implement the combined method of drilling stop hole and FRP reinforcement to repair cracked steel plates subjected to cyclic tension. The crack initiation and growth are experimentally investigated. The stress distribution at the stop hole and the residual fatigue life are evaluated by the FEM. The effects on prolonging residual fatigue life are analyzed. The results show that the effectiveness of only using the stop hole is limited, while the combined method has dramatically prolonged the residual fatigue life. The effect mainly owes to the increasing of the crack initiation life from the stop hole.