The functionality maintenance of infrastructures like bridges is acquiring more and more importance due to the huge economic losses related to the interruption of their regular service. This critical aspects is more stressed considering that new and existing bridges will be included in the new Trans-European Railway Transport Network. In particular, fatigue represents one of the more diffused failure modes occurred in steel and composite steel-concrete bridges: in fact about 80/90% of failures in steel structures are related to fracture and fatigue. Railway bridges endure million of stress cycles during their life and they are expected to be highly vulnerable to such phenomena. Several studies were performed in the past in order to assess the fatigue resistance of steel and steel-concrete composite railway bridges; such studies were the base of modern codes and standards. Despite of these efforts, the fatigue assessment of railway bridges is one of the main issues in current practice due to concurrent events as, for example, the rapid development of the European railway networks, the increase of passenger and freight railway traffic, the introduction of new high strength materials, the adoption of new light and cheap steel and steel-concrete composite solutions characterized by innovative typologies of local details. In this paper, experimental and numerical fatigue analysis of Sesia viaduct, a medium span double box composite bridge of the new Italian HS network, are exposed. Real traffic spectra (composed of train typologies, number of passages, velocities) on Sesia viaduct was evaluated on the basis of the data recorded by a long-term monitoring system. An innovative procedure for the evaluation of train-bridge dynamic interaction phenomena was adopted in order to obtain a proper estimation of real load spectra on critical details. Experimental fatigue S-N tests of such details constituted the basis for the fatigue assessment, realized utilizing the Palmgren-Miner linear damage accumulation law.
Fatigue assessment of Sesia high-speed railway viaduct
CHELLINI, GIUSEPPE;LIPPI, FRANCESCO VITTORIO;SALVATORE, WALTER
2010-01-01
Abstract
The functionality maintenance of infrastructures like bridges is acquiring more and more importance due to the huge economic losses related to the interruption of their regular service. This critical aspects is more stressed considering that new and existing bridges will be included in the new Trans-European Railway Transport Network. In particular, fatigue represents one of the more diffused failure modes occurred in steel and composite steel-concrete bridges: in fact about 80/90% of failures in steel structures are related to fracture and fatigue. Railway bridges endure million of stress cycles during their life and they are expected to be highly vulnerable to such phenomena. Several studies were performed in the past in order to assess the fatigue resistance of steel and steel-concrete composite railway bridges; such studies were the base of modern codes and standards. Despite of these efforts, the fatigue assessment of railway bridges is one of the main issues in current practice due to concurrent events as, for example, the rapid development of the European railway networks, the increase of passenger and freight railway traffic, the introduction of new high strength materials, the adoption of new light and cheap steel and steel-concrete composite solutions characterized by innovative typologies of local details. In this paper, experimental and numerical fatigue analysis of Sesia viaduct, a medium span double box composite bridge of the new Italian HS network, are exposed. Real traffic spectra (composed of train typologies, number of passages, velocities) on Sesia viaduct was evaluated on the basis of the data recorded by a long-term monitoring system. An innovative procedure for the evaluation of train-bridge dynamic interaction phenomena was adopted in order to obtain a proper estimation of real load spectra on critical details. Experimental fatigue S-N tests of such details constituted the basis for the fatigue assessment, realized utilizing the Palmgren-Miner linear damage accumulation law.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
