Estimation of Remaining Life of the Orthotropic Deck of a Bridge Exposed to Extreme Traffic and Wind Actions

Abstract

Design rules in normative documents provide additional capacity to structures by using safety coefficients and considering the worst cases of loads that in most cases never occur during the life of a structure. This extra capacity allows not only to stay on a safe side during the design operational period of structures but also to re-estimate and to extend their possible operational life. One of the most appropriate ways to estimate the remaining life of an existing structure is the extrapolation of monitored actions or load effects in critical details. The main objective of the current study is the assessment of the reliability of the steel orthotropic deck of a viaduct at the end of its design life based on limited data for traffic and static wind actions. The object of study is the Millau viaduct, a cable-stayed bridge located in Southern France, which is exposed to both, heavy traffic loads and wind loading among other actions. Monitoring data used for traffic are provided from the bridge weigh-in-motion system and include six months of data for the more loaded side of the bridge. Wind velocity and directions for the same period are taken from the structural health monitoring system of the viaduct and the nearest weather station. The methodology is based on fitting the generalized Pareto distribution to extreme stresses induced by traffic actions and by wind in order to obtain return levels at the end of the 120 years design live. Reliability indexes for the most critical part of the deck are calculated for both types of load effects separately and for their combination. Moreover, the comparison between models based on data from monitoring and on European standard models is shown.

Fatigue analysis of a bridge deck using the peaks-over-threshold approach with application to the Millau viaduct

“…Wind velocities at different heights ("SHM" in Fig. 4) were collected by the bridge management system and a national weather station located nearby [18,19].…”