The increase in road traffic intensity and loading capacity of a truck over the last decades causes fatigue problems in existing bridges built in the 1960s and 1970s. For steel bridges, this means that the deck structure does not meet the current demands. A solution would be to replace these existing deck structures with Glas Fibre-Reinforced Polymer (GFRP) sandwich webcore deck panels. However, the ministry of infrastructure in the Netherlands has voiced its concern about the fatigue performance and displacements of these deck panels under the high traffic load and intensity. Furthermore, the knowledge about the fatigue performance of GFRP deck panels, applied in the main road network, is still limited. At the time of writing this report, the technical committee, CEN/TC 250 (responsible for developing structural eurocodes), establishes a technical design specification for Fibre-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) structures. This technical specification requires full-scale fatigue testing due to the complex failure modes that can occur. General fatigue damage summation methods like Palmgren-
Miner [30, 41] are not allowed by this technical specification. This report discusses the development of Virtual Fatigue Stiffness Simulation (ViFaSS), a numerical non-linear fatigue stiffness reduction model that can predict the fatigue performance of in-plane stress dominated Glass Fibre-Reinforced Polymer components, with a wide range of lay-up compositions, based on existing knowledge and experiments, including the damage development under multi-axial stress states and stress redistribution. The damage development includes damage accumulation dependency on damage history and damage development dependency on the load type, e.g. Tension-Tension (T-T) or Compression-Compression (C-C). With the low utilisation of the material strength in civil engineering applications, the research is limited to the stiffness degradation of the material. The numerical model is coupled with the Finite Element (FE) software SOFiSTiK where the component is modelled with shell finite elements. The fatigue material response is characterised on a unidirectional ply level based on principal ply directions and based on experimental results from the Optidat program [36]. The coupon response predicted by ViFaSS for constant amplitude T-T and bending fatigue loading was in reasonable agreement with experimental results. For future work it is recommended to extended the model with the ability to use non-linear material behaviour and to include the strength degradation caused by fatigue.

In off-shore structures, the jacket foundations are mainly welded connections in circular hollow sections. These connections exhibit problems in resisting fatigue load. Wrapped composite joints tackle this problem with improved fatigue resistance. However, the material properties are yet unknown. In order to determine the properties on a more fundamental manner chosen than just testing different layups for different scaled experiments. This fundamental manner follows the procedure of identifying the mechanisms and their effect on the composite material. The main effect that will be considered of each mechanism is the stiffness degradation over time in order to determine the fatigue life. For now, the effects of the three (most) significant mechanisms are modelled for a glass fibre reinforced composite layup of a compact tension specimen. These effects are modelled using the plasticity model for inter fibre failure, the virtual crack closure technique for delamination and the ductile damage model for fibre failure.