Composed of multi-strand parallel high-strength wires or steel strands, the stayed cables have been widely used recently in stayed bridges or suspension bridges owing to their light weight and high bearing capacity, especially the steel strands. Meanwhile, chloride-induced corrosion of steel strands is one of the most considerable factors for the durability of the stayed cable exposed to marine environments. The fatigue caused by both cyclic loading and corrosion can affect the life of the steel strands. Besides, the current studies related to the effects of the aforementioned two impact factors on the life of the steel strands either considered the fatigue only, or took the two impact factors into account separately. The coupling effects of fatigue and corrosion on the life of the steel strands are required to be further explored and discussed. Consequently, it is essential to create a model to predict the life of the steel strands with the coupling effects taken into consideration. In this paper, an indoor physical experiment of the steel strand specimens exposed to marine tidal environment was carried out. To avoid accidental errors, the whole specimens were divided into 20 groups, with each group having two steel wires with a 5 days, 10 days, and 15 days cycle for the test. The corrosion of steel strands was observed at various exposure times and it was found that the pits were formed on the surface with the chloride ion erosion to the steel strands. Deeper and sharper pits result in greater pitting-local stress and a shorter fatigue life, which is also the main reason for reducing the carrying capacity of the steel strands. However, a detailed description for this problem is lacking in current domestic and foreign literature, because the pit is hard to predict owing to its complex nature. In order to simulate the evolution of the pits, the stochastic pitting-corrosion model was set up by the neural network method to evaluate the pit evolutions over time. In addition, an empirical formula consisting of length–width ratios, length–depth ratios, and depth-to-width ratios of the pits was obtained to determine the stress concentration factor based on the multi-dimensional linear regression method. The fatigue notch factor of components can be deduced by the stress concentration factor, and the life of the steel strands can be deduced by both of them. The findings are expected to be useful in realistically predicting the durability of wire structures.

Corrosion pits will lead to local stress concentration on the surface of steel strands and even shorter fatigue life and worse mechanical properties of steel strands. In order to explore the corrosion mechanics of steel strands to predict the fatigue life, accelerated salt spray corrosion test is carried out to simulate the corrosion laws of steel strands and record the changes of the corrosion degrees during the experiment, considering the coupling effects of alternating loads and chloride environment. Besides, the impact of stress amplitudes on the corrosion degrees of steel strands is quantitatively studied by the corrosion weight loss, and corroded steel strands in experiment are graded according to the corrosion weight loss to test the mechanical properties, respectively; the results show that the corrosion weight loss and tensile strength of steel strands obey the exponential distribution, and the relationship with elongation is linear. In addition, the relationships between the stress concentration coefficient and the pit length, width, and depth are obtained; with the three-dimensional linear regression theory, the accuracy of the regression model is verified by t-value test, laying a foundation for predicting the corrosion life of the cables.

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Based on analyzing the bearing capacity of existing T-beam bridges in service, the factors that affect the T-beams cracked by chloride ions mainly include the width and the depth of cracks. Combined with practical engineering examples, a single-piece T-beam model is established to explore the influence of factors such as crack width and crack depth on the T-beams affected by chloride ion erosion through numerical simulation in this paper. In addition, the attenuation models of bending capacity and shear capacity of the T-beam are obtained to analyze the possible failure modes of T-beams with cracks. All of which provides a reference for exploring the effect of crack width and depth on the durability of reinforced concrete members under chloride ion field.

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