High-cycle fatigue behavior of riveted connections for railway metal bridges

The evaluation of existing structures, in particular bridges, is becoming increasingly important. In particular for railway bridges, service loads and stress cycles accumulated under traffic loads, and the consequent ageing of existing structures, lead to the need for an assessment of their remaining fatigue life, in order to decide on retrofit or structure replacement. In this context, a 12.4 m span railway bridge near Sacile, Italy, with a common structural scheme for railway bridges, about ninety years old, was taken out of service, transported to a structural laboratory and subjected to both material characterization, monotonic and high-cycle fatigue shear tests. Materials exhibited a yield strength and a tensile strength of about 322 and 421 MPa, respectively, and the hot-spot critical details resulted in the riveted connections of the shear diaphragms that carried the rails. Other material properties that affected the fatigue endurance in a favorable way, and are not taken explicitly into account in structural Codes, were determined. As a result, the equating of riveted shear splices with splices jointed with non-preloaded bolts has been shown, and Eurocode 3-1-9 [EN 1993-1-9. Eurocode 3: Design of steel structures — part 1-9: Fatigue, Brussels: CEN; 2005] design rules have resulted on the safe side, even though no specific category of riveted details has been found to be available.     

Remaining fatigue life of steel railway bridges under enhanced axle loads

In this study, various fatigue damage models proposed by researchers have been briefly discussed and found that the models are problem specific and their efficacy needs to be checked for high cyclic fatigue cases such as in railway bridges. Towards this, field studies were conducted to obtain the strain responses from a steel bridge during the passage of scheduled trains and test train formation with enhanced axle loading. Instrumentation was carried out at critical locations to obtain the responses from the girder. Three different scenarios have been considered to avoid the influence of noise. Further, numerical simulation of the bridge subjected to train loading at different speeds was carried out using ANSYS to obtain synthetic data of strain response from the validated finite element model. Analysis was carried out for normal as well as for futuristic speed of the trains. Responses obtained from field measurements as well as from numerical investigations were used to calculate the damage indices. Based on the damage indices, remaining fatigue life of the bridge was evaluated. The present study can be helpful in assessing the health condition of the railway bridges and to check the suitability of further increase in axle load or speed of trains.     

Assessment of existing steel structures. A guideline for estimation of the remaining fatigue life

A new methodology, called moment matching, to efficiently estimate repair costs of a building due to future earthquake excitation is presented. As well as excitation uncertainties, other uncertainties considered include those in the structural model and those in the capacity to resist damage and the unit repair costs of structural and non-structural components. Given the first few moments of the basic uncertain variables, moment matching uses specially selected point estimates to propagate the uncertainties in order to more accurately estimate the first few moments of the repair costs. Two buildings are chosen as illustrative examples to demonstrate the use of moment matching: one hypothetical three-degree-of-freedom shear building, and a real seven-storey hotel building. It is shown that the moment matching technique is much more accurate than the First-Order Second-Moment approach when propagating the first two moments, whilst the computational cost is of the same order. The repair cost moments estimated by the moment matching technique are also compared to those obtained by the more computationally demanding Monte Carlo simulation, and it is concluded that as long as the order of the moment matching is sufficient, the comparison is satisfactory. Last, but not least, a procedure for sensitivity analysis is discussed and it is concluded that the most important uncertainties for the real building example are those that correspond to spectral acceleration, component capacity, ground motion details and unit repair costs.     

Fatigue life prediction of heavy mining equipment. Part 2: Behaviour of corner crack in steel welded box section and remaining fatigue life determination

Frequent fatigue failure of mining equipment has created a need for fatigue life prediction of several components that suffer from frequent recurrence of fatigue cracking. The focus of this paper is the frequent occurrence of fatigue cracks in the boom of cable shovels, which consists of a twin box girder joining together near both extremities. After the determination of load spectrum and the material fatigue properties by field monitoring and material testing, the fatigue behaviour of a cracked shovel boom was investigated. Two-tip corner cracks were of particular interest since they are commonly observed in the field. These cracks typically initiate in the flange at the toe of web to flange or flange to diaphragm welds and propagate into the web. Detailed finite element models with corner cracks were developed for the boom and stress intensity factors for various crack configurations were evaluated from the finite element analysis results. The growth behaviour of corner cracks was studied and a simplified method is presented for the fatigue life prediction. Fracture toughness tests were conducted on single edge notch bend specimens at room temperature and low temperature (−50 ^°C). The remaining life of a cracked boom is then determined based on brittle fracture or unstable crack growth.     

Static and fatigue behavior of large stud shear connectors for steel-concrete composite bridges

For the design of shear connection in high shear areas of steel-concrete composite bridges, large shear studs can be an excellent alternative. Through the push-out tests on large stud shear connectors up to 30 mm diameter, which are beyond the limitation of current design codes, static and fatigue behavior was investigated and compared with design equations. The ultimate strength of the shear connection showed that the design shear strength in Eurocode-4 and AASHTO LRFD gives conservative values for large studs. The fatigue endurance obtained from the tests was slightly lower than the current design codes in Eurocode-4. Based on the push-out test results on large studs, partial composite beams with about 38% degree of shear connection were fabricated and static tests were performed. The ultimate strength and horizontal shear load redistribution of partial composite beams, which had parameters of stud shank diameters and distribution, were evaluated and group failure in shear span was observed. The ultimate strength of the shear connection had a value about 1.59 times larger than that from push-out tests.