Enhanced Fatigue Life Prediction in Ancient Riveted Metallic Railway Bridges
Palavras-chave:
railway bridges, fatigue prediction, local fatigue approaches, local methods, modal superpositionResumo
The majority of transport investments funded by the European Union are aimed at improving the
capacity of railway infrastructure in order to meet challenging environmental targets, which will culminate in
achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. In this framework, existing railway bridges are relevant and should be
preserved in service for as long as possible according to a sustainability perspective. In this paper, fatigue damage
assessment is addressed, as this phenomenon has been proven to threaten the structural integrity of metallic railway
bridges, affecting severely riveted details in particular. For this type of connection, very limited guidance is given
in standards and codes concerning global methods based on S-N curves for nominal stresses, and unreliable results
may be obtained, limiting the accurate fatigue check. Thus, a multiscale approach using submodelling techniques
leveraged by modal superposition principles can be considered to calculate local fatigue parameters, allowing to
compute the remaining life for the crack initiation and crack propagation phases, in line with the properties of the
load transfer mechanism. From global to local assessment, relevant differences in results are found.
