Fatigue life prediction of horizontally curved thin walled box girder steel bridges

Abstract

The fatigue damage accumulation rates of horizontally curved thin walled box-girder bridge have been estimated from vehicle-induced dynamic stress history using rain flow cycle counting method in the time domain approach. The curved box-girder bridge has been numerically modeled using computationally efficient thin walled box-beam finite elements, which take into account the important structural actions like torsional warping, distortion and distortional warping in addition to the conventional displacement and rotational degrees of freedom. Vehicle model includes heave-pitch-roll degrees of freedom with longitudinal and transverse input to the wheels. The bridge deck unevenness, which is taken as inputs to the vehicle wheels, has been assumed to be a realization of homogeneous random process specified by a power spectral density (PSD) function. The linear damage accumulation theory has been applied to calculate fatigue life. The fatigue life estimated by cycle counting method in time domain has been compared with those found by estimating the PSD of response in frequency domain. The frequency domain method uses an analytical expression involving spectral moment characteristics of stress process. The effects of some of the important parameters on fatigue life of the curved box bridge have been studied.