Fatigue Damage Evaluation and Retrofit of Steel Orthotropic Bridge Decks

Abstract

Since the first application of steel orthotropic deck in bridges, engineers have shown great interest in the popularization of steel decks, based on their various advantages like light-weight, high capacity and so on. However, because of their complex configurations, repeated loading, and stress concentration, many details of steel orthotropic bridge decks are fatigue-sensitive. Recently, considerable increase in traffic volume and wheel loads has caused a number of fatigue cracks in steel orthotropic bridge decks in China. For example, bridge engineers have detected thousands of fatigue cracks in steel orthotropic deck on the main box girder of Humen Bridge only ten years after opening to traffic, which is the first modern suspension bridge with the main span of 888 meters in China. So the bridge owners pay more attention to evaluate the locations of fatigue damages. In current paper, the standard section of the real bridge deck was simulated and a kind of typical fatigue cracks was selected to analyze their fatigue life using S-N curve, the fatigue damage analysis was carried out on the longitudinal ribs to deck plate connections. The fatigue damage analysis results were consistent with the observations from real bridge decks.

Retrofit of an orthotropic steel deck with compact reinforced reactive powder concrete

“…Considerable research has been performed to reveal the mechanisms of fatigue cracking in OSDs by investigating the design (Connor & Fisher, 2006;Kozy, Connor, Paterson, & Mertz, 2011;Nader & Baker, 2014;Wang, Feng, & Duan, 2009) and fabrication procedures (Sim, Uang, & Sikorsky, 2009;Wolchuk, 2014;Ya, Yamada, & Ishikawa, 2011). Adding an extra concrete layer results in decreased traffic-induced stress in some fatigue-prone points of OSDs (Walter, Olesen, Stang, & Vejrum, 2007), and reduced stress leads to a diminished risk of fatigue cracking.…”

Laboratory Research and Evaluation on Design and Application Performance of High-Performance Cold-Mix Resin

“…However, the large-scale construction of orthotropic steel bridges suffers certain disadvantages. The most prominent problems are fatigue damage of orthotropic plate structures and early damage to the bridge deck pavement [7][8][9] and the increasingly urgent difficulties in maintenance of steel bridge decks arising therefrom.…”