Fatigue strength of steel plate girder railway bridges with butt joints reinforced with one-sided rhomb-shaped cover plates

Abstract

Abstract: Due to the long period of service degradation, bridge structures require periodic technical inspections and assessment of the current load capacity. Since the 1970s, this assessment has been carried out according to the Fitness for Purpose criterion. From 2008, the PUK criterion has been replaced with the recommendations of the European Convention on Steel Structures (ECCS). As part of these recommendations, the authors decided to explain the previously obtained unrealistic values of the fatigue class Dsc of the bridge butt joints, covered with one-sided rhomb-shaped cover plates. The computational analysis performed with the FEM method gave excellent results which are briefly presented in the article.