The phrase "a dowel bar" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts related to construction, engineering, or woodworking, where it refers to a cylindrical rod used to reinforce or align materials.
Example: "The contractor recommended using a dowel bar to ensure the stability of the joint between the two concrete slabs."
Alternatives: "dowel rod" or "dowel pin".
Although previous research reported that the pavement with a special dowel bar arrangement shows a good filed performance, there is a need to study how the reduced number of dowel bars achieves the appropriate load transfer across the joints in terms of the concrete bearing stress, dowel shear forces, and slab deflection.
The magnitude of transferred shear load is a function of the dowel bar diameter, dowel bar length, dowel bar spacing, stiffness of the base layer, and slab dimension including thickness, length, and width (Nishizawa et al. 2001; Mackiewicz 2015).
To accurately capture the dowel bar behavior, a finer mesh was considered around the dowel bar and dowel sleeves.
Also, a better understanding regarding the dowel bar load transfer mechanism may help to improve the dowel bar design and construction procedures.
Table 1 presents the recommended dowel bar diameter as a function of pavement slab thickness for several US State highway agencies.
In particular, the use of a finer mesh for the 3-D dowel bar is imperative to accurately capture the dowel-sliding, shear force transfer, and bearing stresses in the concrete.
This study investigates the bonding forces between different types of dowel bar and concrete and explores a new type of dowel bar that would provide a sufficient separation between dowel bar and concrete while maintaining an acceptable level of load transfer efficiency.
A load-transfer capacity prediction model that considered dowel bar position deviation was established via ternary nonlinear regression.
