Preliminary Exploration of Economic Polypropylene-Fiber-Reinforced ECC with Superfine River Sand (SSPP-ECC) Applied to a Bridge Pavement Leveling Overlay

In response to the current common disease of concrete leveling overlays of bridge pavement in China, the feasibility of using an economic SSPP-ECC with local waste superfine sand as an alternative material for a leveling overlay was proposed in this study. To evaluate the interface bonding property in the girder between the SSPP-ECC and concrete, a slant shear test and split tensile test were designed to study the interfacial shear and tensile properties of the ordinary concrete/ordinary concrete (OC/OC) and ordinary concrete/SSPP-ECC (OC/ECC), where the results showed that SSPP-ECC could significantly improve the interface shear stress and split tensile strength compared to ordinary concrete. Furthermore, the damage status of OC/ECC no longer involved fracturing along the interface; instead, each of the two substrates was partially destroyed, which revealed that OC/ECC had a high bonding effect. Moreover, a restrained shrinkage test was carried out to evaluate the shrinkage property of SSPP-ECC, where the result showed that the shrinkage strain of SSPP-ECC was slightly lower than concrete, where the average cracking time for SSPP-ECC was far longer than for ordinary concrete under the same ambient drying conditions; furthermore, the stress rate for SSPP-ECC revealed that it was a low-cracking-risk material. Meanwhile, the crack width of SSPP-ECC was only 0.1 mm after 35 d, which showed that SSPP-ECC had a more substantial crack width control capacity relative to concrete. The test results initially verified the feasibility and great potential of economic SSPP-ECC applied in a bridge pavement leveling overlay.