Abstract
In Portugal there is a number of old metallic riveted railway and highway bridges that were erected by the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, and are still in operation, requiring inspections and remediation measures to overcome fatigue damage. Residual fatigue life predictions should be based on actual fatigue data from bridge materials which is scarce due to the material specificities. Fatigue crack propagation data of materials from representative Portuguese riveted bridges, namely the Pinhão and Luiz I road bridges, the Viana road/railway bridge, the Fão road bridge and the Trezói railway bridge were considered in this study. The fatigue crack growth rates were correlated using the Paris’s law. Also, a statistical analysis of the pure mode I fatigue crack growth (FCG) data available for the materials from the ancient riveted metallic bridges is presented. Based on this analysis, design FCG curves are proposed and compared with BS7910 standard proposal, for the Paris region, which is one important fatigue regime concerning the application of the Fracture Mechanics approaches, to predict the remnant fatigue life of structural details.
Highlights
I n Portugal, the major concern of governmental agencies is related with the maintenance and safety of centenaries riveted steel bridges
The present paper reports research work carried out to determine the design fatigue crack growth (FCG) curves of materials from ancient Portuguese riveted bridges, namely the Pinhão, Fão and Luiz I road bridges, built in 1906, 1891 and 1886, respectively, the Eiffel road/railway bridge and the Trezói railway bridge
The design FCG curves were obtained using the procedure proposed by Gallegos Mayorga et al [2] and a comparison with design crack propagation curves proposed by BS7910 standard [3] is made
Summary
I n Portugal, the major concern of governmental agencies is related with the maintenance and safety of centenaries riveted steel bridges These old riveted road and railway bridges were fabricated and placed into service during the 19th century and beginning of 20th century. The crack propagation data is essential to perform fatigue life predictions according to the Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM), which is an important alternative to the usual code-based S-N curve procedures, mainly in what concerns residual life estimations. In this perspective, the knowledge about design fatigue crack growth curves for materials from ancient Portuguese steel bridges is extremely appropriate [1]. Bogdanov et al [12] proposed a probabilistic analysis of the fatigue crack growth rates based on the Monte-Carlo method applied to the Unigrow model
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