Safety Analysis of Steel Box Girder Bridges With Pitting Corrosion

Abstract

Steel bridges corrode due to environmental exposure. The consequence is a reduction in both the load-carrying capacity and safety of a bridge. Therefore, it is needed to evaluate procedures for an exact prediction of the load-carrying capacity and reliability of bridges, in order to make reasonable decisions about repair, rehabilitation and renewal. The aim of this study is to develop and demonstrate a procedure for the assessment of steel box girder bridge ultimate strength reliability that takes the degradation of plate members due to pit corrosion into account. The present paper treats the effect of pitting corrosion on the load-carrying capacity and reliability of steel box girder bridges and the results are compared with the uniform corrosion effect. The procedure and results of this study can be used for the better prediction of the service life of deteriorating steel box girder bridges and the development of optimal reliability-based maintenance strategies.

Mechanical Behaviour of Corroded Structural Steel Subjected to Monotonic Tension

“…2(d). Sharifi [21] studied the ultimate capacity of steel beams with pitting corrosion by artificial neural networks and analysed the safety of corroded steel box girder bridges [22]. The reverse modelling method can reflect the actual morphology of the corroded steel surface, but it heavily depends on the data obtained through scanning and is only suitable for simulating the object or area being scanned.…”