Remaining fatigue life estimates for riveted railway bridges

摘要

A large number of metallic railway bridges currently in use in the UK are of riveted construction and are close to 100 years old. A fatigue assessment methodology is needed for such bridges since these may be close to the end of their fatigue lives. Part of such a methodology is the global analysis of the bridge in order to identify the most fatigue critical details. The aim of this paper is to present results, in terms of Miner's damage at the riveted connections of a typical riveted UK railway bridge, obtained from a global finite element analysis under various train loadings.