Fatigue Life Prediction of Plain and Reinforced Concrete – A Review

Many infrastructures like Bridge decks, airfield and highway pavements, offshore structure and machinery foundation are subjected to fatigue loading. This cyclic loading induces gradual, permanent internal changes in a material and thereby affecting the remaining life of the infrastructure. The heterogeneities in concrete add complexities in analysing fatigue failure of reinforced concrete. This review paper discuss about fatigue life prediction models for both plain and reinforced concrete structural member. This review paper comprises various deterministic and probabilistic models used in predicting the fatigue life of plain and reinforced concrete. Deterministic approach is dependent on some initial parameters and conditions and is unreliable to accurately determine the fatigue life of concrete. This results in the development of a more generalized model based on a probabilistic approach that accounts for the stochasticity in fatigue failure of concrete. In recent years, artificial neural network emerged as a new promising computational tool which adopts a probabilistic approach for modelling complex relationships.