Development of fatigue test method and improvement of fatigue life by new functional steel plates for welding of trough rib and deck plate of orthotropic decks

Under heavy traffic conditions, some fatigue cracks have been found at welding joints between U-shaped ribs “trough ribs” and deck plates. Fatigue cracks along thickness direction of deck plate from root tip are important because visual crack detection from outside is limited. In this paper, new functional steel plates with initiation resistance of fatigue crack at weldment and propagation resistance at base material are applied to deck plate to evaluate improvement of fatigue life. We conducted fixed-point fatigue tests with real scale partial models consisted with one trough rib and a transverse girder, and the elastic FEM (Finite Element Method) analysis corresponding to the fatigue test specimen. Based on these results, we studied the fatigue properties which focused on the difference between conventional steel plates and newly developed steel plates, FCA (Fatigue Crack Arrester). Fatigue cracks were initiated from root tip of welded joints between a trough rib and a deck plate. It is clarified that FCA steel plates instead of conventional steel plates can improve the fatigue life under the same welding conditions. This improvement effect becomes much clearer in the high cycle region, which is noticeable at the operation and management stage of bridges.