Fatigue crack identification and lifetime prediction for steel bridge deck structures

Fatigue crack identification and lifetime prediction for steel bridge deck structures

Pahlavan, P.L.
Pijpers, R.J.M.
Hakkesteegt, H.C.
Jansen, T.H.
Peelen, W.H.A.

2015

Fatigue, as the governing degradation mechanism in steel bridge decks, can lead to non-inspectable cracks under the welded intersections of stiffeners to the deck plate. As a result, estimation of the remaining service life and optimization of the maintenance program of steel bridge decks become a great challenge. A comprehensive structural health monitoring (SHM) system comprising acoustic emission (AE), guided waves (GW), and strain measurements has been developed and implemented on a test bridge deck subject to fatigue loading in the laboratory environment. These measurement systems provided the necessary information to a crack growth model, e.g. crack location by AE, crack size using GW, and stress distribution from the strain measurements. It has been demonstrated that the prognosis accuracy can substantially be improved when proper crack diagnosis is performed. The estimated crack growth showed good correlation with the reference time-of-flight diffraction (ToFD) measurements: less than 20% error in length and depth estimation over 8,000,000 cycles was shown to be feasible.

Fluid & Solid Mechanics Observation, Weapon & Protection Systems
PID - Process & Instrumentation Development SR - Structural Reliability DSS - Distributed Sensor Systems
TS - Technical Sciences
High Tech Systems & Materials
Mechanics
Industrial Innovation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4c1d6413-b696-45ef-bcc5-6ce45641bcee

529428

DEStech Publications

9781605951119

System Reliability for Verification and Implementation, Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring, IWSHM 2015, 9-10 September 2015, Stanford, CA, USA, 343-350

conference paper