A look at the performance of barrel and wedge assembly in cable bolts applications

Pretensioning is one of the most common practices in cable bolting. A barrel and wedge is typically used in the free end of the cable to hold the pretension load. This study investigates the performance of barrel and wedge in cable bolt large-scale laboratory pull out tests. Twenty-five experiments have been completed containing various barrel and wedge and cable sizes under different loading conditions, namely monotonic and cyclic. The results indicated barrel and wedges undergo constant displacement throughout the experiment. The cyclic tests suggest that the barrel and wedge assembly displacement are almost entirely non-reversible. Two distinct behaviours, namely exponential and deflection point based, were observed. The study concludes that barrel and wedge assemblies can significantly influence the performance of cable bolts under axial load.