Adhesive joints for structural elements of high performance concrete (HPC)

As a first step of the research project "Design and Optimization of Adhesive Joints for Plate and Sheet Structures of High Performance Concrete", tension tests on micro reinforced specimens of HPC with different joint geometries were carried out. Ln addition reference tests with specimens without a joint were tested. As one possible manufacturing technique to realize the joint geometry, the water jet cutting technique was used. A reactive powder concrete (RPC) adhesive was used to glue the different parts together. In all tests the load hearing capacity is only limited by the tensile strength and the cross section of the reinforcement. The joints affect the load hearing capacity only in the way that the cross section of the reinforcement is reduced but not because of the low bond tensile strength of the adhesive. Furthermore numerical calculations were carried out to investigate the stress distribution.