Effect on Stresses of Structural Details of Orthotropic Steel Deck with Thin Surfacing

Abstract

Although it has the advantage of decreasing the loads on bridge deck when adopting thin surfacing, it is worse for the stress dispersion of vehicle loads, as a result, it is easy to generate local stress concentration of structural details of orthotropic steel deck. To study the stresses of orthotropic steel bridge decks, especially for the structural weld details, which is significant for fatigue durability evaluation. Partial models are created by finite element analyses to analyze the stresses of both normal thickness bridge pavement and thin surfacing under different load locations, and the kinds of material of pavement and the thickness of bridge deck are also considered in the calculations. It’s found that stress amplitude of objective fatigue details of TPO pavement increase up to 28.4% when the models share the same structure dimension, and the thickness of TPO pavement has little impact on the stress amplitude of objective fatigue details which could be ignored, while the influence of the thickness of the TPO pavement is considerable. And the increase of the thickness of bridge deck helps decrease the stress amplitude of objective fatigue details.