Fatigue Evaluation and Detection of Critical Fatigue Location for Bridge Deck Sections

Abstract

This paper presents an effective approach for fatigue evaluation and detection of deck sections for bridges with online structural health monitoring system, The strain-time history recorded by the structural health monitoring system under actual traffic loading is investigated, and the strategy for fatigue evaluation of bridge decks on basis of the structural health monitoring data is provided for blocked repealed cycles of strain history, The effective stress range is used to evaluate the fatigue strength at different location of the bridge deck and to detect the critical location for possible fatigue failure, Calculated results of the fatigue evaluation and detection of critical locations arc given for a deck section of the Tsing Ma Bridge.