Experimental Investigation of the Anchorage Capacity of Looped Wire Ropes in Precast Concrete Element Connections

Traditionally, precast concrete elements have been connected with a U-bar connection where cantilevered U-shaped reinforcement bars are overlapped in the connection. The connection is subsequently reinforced with a locking bar and cast with mortar. As this connection makes the on-site installation time-consuming, the so-called looped wire rope connections have recently become popular. Here, flexible wire ropes replace the rigid U-bars. The models available in the literature for calculating the capacity of a looped wire rope connection assumes sufficient anchorage capacity of the looped wire ropes. As no experimental studies or calculation models exist for the anchorage capacity in the literature, the anchorage capacity must be demonstrated experimentally for each application. This paper presents an extensive experimental programme of 50 specimens on the anchorage capacity of looped wire ropes. The experimental programme varies several essential design parameters, such as anchorage length of the wire rope, reinforcement in the anchorage zone, and element thickness. The observed failure mechanisms are studied using digital image correlation. The study shows that the varied design parameters affect the failure mechanism, the load-displacement curve and the anchorage capacity. The results are compared with Eurocode 2, part 4, which does not cover the failure mode and underestimates the capacity.