• International Journal of Highway Engineering
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.21-30
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• 2011

As well known, dowel bars are used to transfer traffic load acting on one edge to another edge of concrete slab in concrete pavement system. The dowel bars widely used in South Korea are round shape steel bar and they shows satisfactory performance under bending stress which is developed by repetitive traffic loading and environment loading. However, they are not invulnerable to erosion that may be caused by moisture from masonry joint or bottom of the pavement system. Especially, the erosion could rapidly progress with saline to prevent frost of snow in winter time. The problem under this circumstance is that the erosion not only drops strength of the steel dower bar but also comes with volume expansion of the steel dowel bar which can reduce load transferring efficiency of the steel dowel bar. To avoid this erosion problem in reasonable expenses, dowers bars with various materials are being developed. Fiber reinforced plastic(FRP) dower that is presented in this paper is suggested as an alternative of the steel dowel bar and it shows competitive resistance against erosion and tensile stress. The FRP dowel bar is developed in tube shape and is filled with high strength no shrinkage. Several slab thickness designs with the FRP dowel bars are performed by evaluating bearing stress between the dowel bar and concrete slab. To calculated the bearing stresses, theoretical formulation and finite element method(FEM) are utilized with material properties measured from laboratory tests. The results show that both FRP tube dowel bars with diameters of 32mm and 40mm satisfy bearing stress requirement for dowel bars. Also, with consideration that lean concrete is typical material to support concrete slab in South Korea, which means low load transfer efficiency and, therefore, low bearing stress, the FRP tube dowel bar can be used as a replacement of round shape steel bar.