Fracture Behavior of Dowel Joint of Concrete Slab Track

Recently, an interest on joint behavior between adjacent concrete slab tracks has increasing due to large application of such track system. Dowel bars are widely used to improve load transfer capacity across the joints. Dowel bars reduce the deflections and stresses by transferring the load between the slabs. This study proposes the lumped shear spring model to efficiently model dowel joints of adjacent slabs. This model includes bearing stiffness between dowel bar and concrete as well as dowel gap. Strength of the proposed spring model is evaluated based on Concrete Capacity Design method under the assumption of shear failure mode in the joints. Experiments are also performed up to failure to evaluate the accuracy of the proposed model. It has been observed that the proposed model is able to predict initial nonlinearity due to dowel gap, and capture material nonlinearity of the test slabs. Thus, it is recommended that the proposed model can be effectively applied to the dowel joints of concrete slab track.