Influence of the progressive pavement deterioration on the steel- concrete composite highway bridges service life

Resumo

Nowadays, the significant increase associated to the vehicle’s weight and traffic volume on the highway
bridge decks has made these structures subjected to several degradation phenomena. In this context, structural
fatigue is one of these progressive degradation events induced by vehicles dynamic impacts that can produce
significant increasing of the stress values. Having these ideas in mind, this research work aims is to develop an
analysis methodology to assess the fatigue performance of steel-concrete composite highway bridges, including
the dynamic actions due to vehicles convoys and the pavement progressive deterioration effect. The developed
analysis methodology is based on the use of Miner-Palmgren linear cumulative damage rule, Rainflow algorithm
and S-N curves associated to the traditional design codes. This way, the investigated structural model corresponds
to a steel-concrete composite highway bridge spanning 40 m subjected to vehicles traffic. The developed numerical
model adopted the usual mesh refinement techniques present in Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations
implemented in the ANSYS program. The main conclusions of this investigation focused on verify the extension
of the dynamical effects on the service life of steel-concrete composite highway bridges due to vehicles crossing
on the deteriorated pavement surface.