Damage diagnosis and fretting wear performance analysis of short suspenders in cable-supported bridges

Abstract

Bridge suspenders with short length suffer from significant damage, usually following short service life, heavy casualties and property losses. In this paper, damage in the short suspenders was investigated macroscopically by inspection and field measurement. Inter-wire fretting wear due to different axial deformation and lateral shrinkage deformation of the wires with helical angle was confirmed as one of the damage cause. To investigate the fretting wear effect in the short suspender, refined FE models of the wire rope were generated by using parametric modeling method. Furthermore, inter-wire deformations and contact stresses were simulated and analyzed. Investigation of damage mechanism and fretting wear performance analysis of the short suspender contributes to the understanding of damage mechanism and the service safety of bridge cables.