Abstract
This paper presents a new method to estimate the remaining fatigue lives of riveted connections of railway bridges. The proposed method mainly consists of secondary stress histories, recently developed sequential law and fully known Wohler curve. It is essential to use the fully known Wohler curve. Therefore the technique, which utilizes the transfer of the partially known code given Wohler curve to a fully known curve, is also discussed. Initially the details of new damage indicator based sequential law and it's proposed extension for multiaxial fatigue is described. Secondly the remaining fatigue life of an existing riveted bridge connection is estimated by introducing a new method. Hence validity and merits of the proposed method is confirmed by comparing the results with previous methods-based fatigue lives.
Highlights
Rail authorities all over the world are paying special attention to evaluate the remaining fatigue life of riveted railway bridges, since most of these bridges are nearing the end of their design fatigue lives [1]
Most of the present day fatigue assessment approaches of railway bridges are generally based on combination of primary stress histories under actual traffic load [2,3], Miner's rule [4] and railway code provided design fatigue curve
In the present approach, S-N curves, which correspond to the detail class [5] of riveted connection, are considered to capture the fatigue damage due to the secondary stresses near the riveted connection or discontinuities
Summary
Rail authorities all over the world are paying special attention to evaluate the remaining fatigue life of riveted railway bridges, since most of these bridges are nearing the end of their design fatigue lives [1]. Studies done in this area are few and most of the approaches were based on combination of secondary stress histories, equivalent effective stress with Miner's rule [4] and railway code provided mean fatigue curve. The main objective of this paper is to estimate remaining fatigue life of a riveted railway bridge connection due to the effect of secondary stresses using the multiaxial sequential law. In this approach, fully known SN curve is essential to use as the related fatigue curve. The paper presents comparisons of obtained fatigue lives with the previous Miner's rulebased estimations
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