Fatigue Design of Steel Bridges Considering the Effect of Dynamic Vehicle Loading and Overloaded Trucks
Publication: Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 21, Issue 9
Abstract
The current practice for bridge-fatigue design may have underestimated the effect of dynamic vehicle loading and truck overloading on the fatigue life of steel bridges. In this study, a new approach for fatigue design of steel bridges was proposed that considers the effect of these two factors more rationally. A three-dimensional vehicle–bridge coupled model was developed to simulate the interaction between the bridge and vehicle. A simply supported steel I-girder bridge was used as an example for illustration of the proposed approach. The fatigue vehicle model was adopted from the AASHTO LRFD code, and overloading was considered by increasing the gross weight of the truck model. Numerical simulations were conducted to study the influence of three important parameters—road surface condition (RSC), vehicle speed, and truck gross weight—on the fatigue damage of the bridge considered. The results show that the RSC and truck gross weight both have a significant impact on the bridge-fatigue damage. By considering the cumulative fatigue damage caused by each truck passage under different RSCs and the deterioration process of the RSC during its whole lifecycle, a simple and reasonable expression was proposed for bridge-fatigue design. The proposed approach improves the current bridge-fatigue design method in that it rationally considers the vehicle dynamic effect, the influence of overloaded trucks, and the deterioration of RSC, which have a large influence on bridges’ fatigue life.
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51208189 and 51478176) and the Excellent Youth Foundation of Hunan Scientific Committee (Grant No. 14JJ1014).
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Published In
Journal of Bridge Engineering
Volume 21 • Issue 9 • September 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 12, 2015
Accepted: Jan 27, 2016
Published online: Mar 10, 2016
Discussion open until: Aug 10, 2016
Published in print: Sep 1, 2016
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