Abstract
Fatigue is a crucial factor which affects the total life and serviceability of highway bridges. There are several factors that contribute to the development of fatigue in RC bridges. Among them, traffic loads, wind loads and corrosion of reinforcement are some of the important factors to name a few. In order to address these fatigue issues and improve the fatigue life of highway bridges, many improvement meth- ods have been suggested in the literature. This study attempts to investigate the effectiveness of various improvement methods suggested in the literature. The improvement methods that has been included in this study are externally bonded reinforcement and deck overlay. To accomplish the objective, an existing highway bridge was selected based on the structural details and traffic data and then various improvement methods were applied to analyze its improvement in fatigue life. For analysis, an embedded reinforcement modeling was carried out in ANSYS followed by a nonlinear analysis in ANSYS workbench. The results of the study were found to be in alignment with AASTHO LRFD (2007), IRC SP 60(2002), IRC 6 (2014), IRC SP 37 (2010) and IRC 37 (2012) codal provisions.
Highlights
Highway bridges are subjected to variability in traffic load, wind load and corrosion of reinforcement, which results in deterioration of the deck
The results showed that the application of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP), Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer (GFRP), Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and the polymeric overlays of epoxy and polyester increased the minimum fatigue life cycles to million and the methacrylate polymeric overlay increased the fatigue life cycle to million cycles
The results demonstrated that the minimum fatigue life cycle increased to 37 million cycles after application of CFRP and GFRP as externally bonded reinforcement
Summary
Highway bridges are subjected to variability in traffic load, wind load and corrosion of reinforcement, which results in deterioration of the deck. Variable amplitude of dynamic loading from traffic and deterioration on the road surface leads to damage accumulation on the structure. This damage further develops into micro cracks and brings in serious fatigue failure of the bridge. In addition to traffic loading, the bridge deck is exposed to several aggressive environmental conditions which add on to fatigue development This phenomenon of fatigue development arising out of the combined effect of corrosive environment and dynamic vehicle loading on the structure is referred as corrosion fatigue. Seon Ji et al (2011) analyzed the static and fatigue behavior of composite sandwich bridge deck made up of hybrid GFRP steel core and compared the laboratory test results with the ANSYS software. Different methods for fatigue life improvement are applied on the ANSYS model of the bridge and the effectiveness of each method has been captured
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