Life cycle assessment of existing steel bridges considering corrosion and fatigue coupled problems

Corrosion and fatigue are important issues which affect the structural performance of steel bridges. This is particularly important for bridges and viaduct, for their key role in infrastructural nets. As the management of bridges net requires the prediction of the remaining life for all partially deteriorated structures, the development of assessment models for time-varying changes in structural performance due to the coupled problem of corrosion and fatigue is relevant and need to be investigated. In this paper, the accumulated load cycles causing cracking or even failure is analyzed together with different scenarios of corrosion propagation. The analysis is performed for the fatigue limit state function of shear in a detailed riveted connection. Predic- tion of the remaining fatigue life is illustrated on a typical example of existing bridge girders. Variations in the remaining life are evaluated as a function of time, covering the whole life-time of the bridge.