Abstract
Under repetitive heavy train traffic, railway steel truss bridges tend to have many fatigue related performance issues, especially at welded joints. Accurate estimation of the stress history at critical locations of welded joints under vehicle loading is important for joint fatigue design. Traditionally, vehicle loads were treated as moving static loads without considering their dynamic effects. In this study, a numerical procedure was introduced to incorporate the effect of dynamic response of the train–bridge coupled system on nodal fatigue damage. The proposed approach employs a twolevel modelling scheme which combines dynamic analysis for the full train-bridge system and detailed stress analysis at the joint. Miner rule was used to determine the cumulative fatigue damage at critical locations on the welded joint. A sensitivity analysis was conducted for different train loading configurations. It was determined that dynamic vibration negatively influences fatigue life. The calculated cumulative damage at investigated locations can more than the damage estimated using only static moving load method.
Highlights
With the recent fast development of the railroad infrastructure in China, the number of long span railroad steel bridges has increased significantly
Fatigue analysis (Bush 1988) of a bridge has been conducted using the method of moving loads and influence line, in which the train axle loads are treated as series of static loads moving along the span of the bridge
In order to evaluate the consistency of this observed difference between the fatigue damage prediction using static load and dynamic simulation, several different loading conditions were investigated in this study
Summary
With the recent fast development of the railroad infrastructure in China, the number of long span railroad steel bridges has increased significantly These structures are relatively new, fatigue related performance and safety issues have been a concern during the design process. There is a lack of fatigue performance studies on long span railroad bridges considering their true dynamic behaviour. This has provided the impetus for this study. This paper is focused on a comparative study between the accumulated damage resulted from traditional static moving load method and a procedure with the train-bridge dynamics fully incorporated. A train-bridge coupled dynamic analysis program developed by the authors was used to generate time history of the internal force of the members near a critical joint. A realistic long span cable-stayed bridge was used as the prototype, with a series of different train configurations
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