Influence of Fatigue Crack Formation and Propagation on Reliability of Steel Members

Abstract

During the years of bridge exploitation, many degradation processes and external influences attack its structure. Therefore, bridge reliability and durability is decreasing in time. On the other hand, the traffic load remains almost the same or even higher than in the past. However, bridges should not to become the limiting component of communication capacity and traffic reliability. Regarding to reliability, bridges should be assessed from the viewpoint of the Ultimate Limit States (ULS) and Serviceability Limit States (SLS). Within the ULS, cross-sections and members are verified for various types of stressing and their combinations, and also for fatigue at the same time. The cross-sectional verification, e.g., for bending stresses and fatigue, is done independently according to corresponding criteria of the ULS determined for strength verification a fatigue assessment separately. The presented article deals with the steel railway plate girder bridge with bottom member deck, in which there is an effort to prove the effect of the crack in tension bottom flange due to fatigue stressing on the change of bending resistance over time. The analytical calculation was derived and at the same time, the probabilistic approach of the influence of the fatigue crack size on the change of the cross-sectional resistance and reliability over time was used.