Fatigue reliability evaluation of short-span concrete bridges under dynamic impacts of stochastic truck loading

Abstract

This study presents an approach for the fatigue stress spectrum simulation of short-span bridges under the dynamic impacts of stochastic traffic loading. This approach is utilised to evaluate the fatigue reliability of existing bridges. Response functions defined by intervals are used to approximate the equivalent fatigue stress range of the bridge. Probability models of the fatigue stress ranges are evaluated with Gaussian mixture models. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated via a case study of a simply supported bridge. The numerical results indicate that the impact effect of vehicle loads on short-span bridge leads to an obvious increase in both the stress range and the number of stress cycles. Both the degradation of the road surface roughness condition and the traffic growth lead to a significant decrease in the fatigue reliability.