Publication

Abstract : In the present paper, fatigue life of a steel box girder bridge has been evaluated by two approaches and the influencing parameters on fatigue life have been studied. In the first approach, the box girder bridge has been idealized as a Euler–Bernoulli beam and the coupled bridge–vehicle equations are developed. In the second approach, vehicle equations are first solved taking bridge as rigid. The pavement force found from the vehicle response and road roughness has been given as input in 3-D FEM model created in CSI Bridge. Fatigue life of the bridge component at the critical location has been found out using Miner approach and the stress time history from coupled and uncoupled schemes has been used for comparison purpose. The parameters which affect the fatigue life, i.e., velocity of the vehicle and road surface roughness are varied to observe the effect on fatigue life.