Ultimate strength and fatigue life of cable-stayed bridges considering cable corrosion

Abstract

<p>Cable corrosion significantly decreases the ultimate and fatigue strength of cable-stayed bridges. It might lead to lose the cables and may affect to the entire bridge significantly. In this paper, parametric studies with three different span lengths, different corrosion levels and loss of different cables were performed. Whereas the ultimate strength lowered by about 25% as the cross-sectional area decreased due to corrosion. The elongation also decreases due to corrosion. The ultimate strength was found to sharply drop when the elongation became 1.0%. The fatigue strength of stays was studied taking a 500kN heavy lorry as the representative load. The fatigue strength sharply lowers as corrosion progresses and the severely corrode anchor cable becomes less than 4% of the healthy one. The anchor cables showed the most significant effect to the entire bridges.</p>