Fatigue Assessment and Service Life Prediction of Existing Steel Bridges by Integrating SHM into a Probabilistic Bilinear Approach
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 139, Issue 10
Abstract
Fatigue assessment of several steel bridge details, having equivalent stress range below the constant amplitude fatigue threshold (CAFT), showed that many of these details are free of cracks, although the remaining life calculations predicted that they should have already been suffering from cracks. This shows that the current methods for predicting the fatigue remaining life of steel bridges can be conservative and may lead to unnecessary retrofit and rehabilitation actions. For a better fatigue life prediction, a bilinear approach has been proposed. In this approach, the bilinear lines have different slopes above and below the CAFT. This paper addresses fatigue assessment and service life prediction of existing fatigue-prone steel bridges by integrating structural health monitoring (SHM) data into a probabilistic bilinear approach. The effect of changing the value of the slope of the AASHTO lines below the CAFT on the fatigue life is investigated through a parametric study. In addition, an existing steel bridge is used to illustrate the proposed probabilistic approach.
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Acknowledgments
The support by grants from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Community and Economic Development, through the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance (PITA) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the Federal Highway Administration under Cooperative Agreement DTFH61-07-H-0040, and the support from the Office of Naval Research under Award N-00014-08-0188. The authors greatly appreciate the discussions with Professor Ben T. Yen, ATLSS Engineering Research Center, Lehigh University. The authors also acknowledge the support from Mr. Thomas Hardinger, WisDOT, for providing additional information about the studied bridge. The opinions and conclusions presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring organizations.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 139 • Issue 10 • October 2013
Pages: 1728 - 1740
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Mar 2, 2011
Accepted: Feb 17, 2012
Published online: Feb 22, 2012
Published in print: Oct 1, 2013
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