Impact fatigue behaviour of GFRP mesh reinforced engineered cementitious composites for runway pavement

Concrete runway pavement faces a long term issue of cracking resulting in reduced durability and increased maintenance cost. This paper proposes a new type of runway pavement using engineered cementitious composites (ECC) with glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) mesh reinforcements. This paper investigates the impact fatigue behaviour of the GFRP mesh reinforced ECC pavement through a series of cyclic impact tests. Five impact pressures were adopted considering the impacts induced by various types of airplanes. The number of impacts when the first crack appeared (N₀) and at the failure (N_C) were reported. The experimental results show that N₀ of GFRP mesh reinforced ECC is increased by a maximum of 800 times comparing to that of concrete pavement. The GFRP mesh reinforced ECC could sustain 30,000 impacts without failure. Finally, a non-destructive health monitoring algorithm was proposed based on the ultrasonic testing method and validated using the experimental results. This method is able to assess the damage status, and predict the remaining impact fatigue life of the GFRP mesh reinforced ECC pavement.