Fatigue assessment of steel-concrete composite highway bridges considering a progressive pavement deterioration model

Resumo

Highway bridges are subjected to random traffic loads with relevant impact dynamic loadings along
all their service life. The road-roughness of asphalt pavements represents a key issue to the significant decrease
of the highway bridge decks service life. Having this context in mind, this article aims to develop an analysis
methodology to assess the fatigue performance of highway bridges, including the dynamic actions due to
vehicles and the effect of the progressive deterioration of the pavement, taking into account the road surface

damages. The developed methodology is based on a linear cumulative damage rule, and the use of the Rainflow-
counting algorithm and S-N curves from main design codes. The investigated structural model corresponds to a

steel-concrete composite highway bridge deck, with straight axis, simple supported and spanning 13.0m by
40.0m. In this work, the numerical model developed for the dynamic analysis of the steel-concrete composite
bridge adopted the usual mesh refinement techniques present in Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations
implemented in the ANSYS computational program. The results of a parametric analysis are presented aiming to
verify the extension of the dynamical effects on the service life of highway bridges due to vehicles crossing on
the irregular pavement surface.