Concurrent multi-scale fatigue damage evolution simulation method for long-span steel bridges

Abstract

Fatigue damage is one of the leading causes for structural failure of long-span steel bridges, but fatigue damage evolution of a long-span steel bridge is very complex. This study proposes a concurrent multi-scale fatigue damage evolution simulation method for long-span steel bridges from micro short crack nucleation and growth to macro structural component damage until mega structural failure. As a case study, the fatigue damage evolution of the Stonecutters Bridge in Hong Kong under cyclic vehicle loading is finally simulated using the proposed method. It shows that the proposed method is computationally feasible even for such a large scale structure. The method can provide a clear picture how micro short cracks grow into macro fatigue damage of structural components and eventually lead to mega structural failure.

Auto‐adaptive multiblock cycle jump algorithm for fatigue damage simulation of long‐span steel bridges

“…As shown in Figure , Stonecutters cable‐stayed bridge is now the world's third longest cable‐stayed bridge with a 1018 m main span and a total length of 1596 m. The introduction of the bridge can be found in other studies , …”

“…In the fatigue design of Stonecutters Bridge, assuming that the highway loading refer to full traffic load condition on the bridge deck is equal to 3.6 HA where 1HA = 16 KN/m per lane for normal condition under dual‐3 traffics, and BS5400: Part 10 is used for fatigue design of Stonecutters cable‐stayed bridge, the equivalent number of standard fatigue vehicles in BS5400: Part 10 per lane can be obtained. The figure of axle arrangement and loading of the standard fatigue vehicle can be found in other study . And, all the equivalent number of standard fatigue vehicles crossing the bridge once is defined as one cyclic loading case here.…”

A continuum damage model for prediction of crack initiation life of pitting corrosion and fatigue

“…The damage variable is assumed as a scalar for isotropic damage models, and is typically defined as where A is the total cross-sectional area of the mesoscale representative volume element (RVE), trueA˜ is the effective cross-sectional area. The development of CDM provides a new approach to study the damage process and failure for different structures with different materials (Fan et al., 2020; Park et al., 2021; Sun, 2018; Sun and Xu, 2021; Sun et al., 2019). Based on CDM, Chaboche and Lesne (1988), Lemaitre (1987), Lemaitre and Desmorat (2005) successively proposed several models for fatigue damage, which were frequently introduced into studies for finite element simulation of CFCI (Cui et al., 2020; Hu et al., 2016; Jie et al., 2018; Sun, 2018; Zheng and Wang, 2020).…”

A continuum damage-based three-dimensional fracture simulation method for brittle-like materials

“…Although there exists some limitations, CDM based methods have the capability and been widely used to predict failure behavior of materials and engineering structures based on the following advantages (Li et al., 2019; Mareau and Morel, 2019; Pandey et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2021). Since these CDM based methods do not require the reprocessing such as re-meshing during damage and fracture simulation, they usually have high computational efficiency.…”