Evaluation of Remaining Fatigue Life of Pre-Stressed Concrete Railway Bridge
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Date
2023-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Nowadays reinforced bridges are being replaced by pre-stressed bridges because of their cost efficiency and serviceability. Pre-stressed concrete railway bridges are widely used in various parts of the world. Their main function is to transfer load coming from the track supper structure to the sub-structure part like of that pier through bearing. The bridges are mostly failed by fatigue failure as a result of repeated cyclic load. Previously, the fatigue life of the railway bridges subjected to design and operational loading on these loading capacities, has not been well investigated on the Addis Ababa LRT. The general objective of this thesis is to estimate the remaining fatigue life of pre-stressed concrete railway bridge subjected to operational cyclic load. The study addresses the fatigue life of pre-stressed concrete railway bridge of Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit as a case study. Imperative issues like load application, bearing profile and arrangement of static analysis results to generate the data for fatigue evaluations have been studied. To implement this numerical approach, ANSYS 2020 was used. The minimum fatigue life obtained is 1e8 cycles. These number of cycles correspond to about 114.16 years which is 14 percent more than the design life of the railway bridge. The railway bridge serves more than the design life of 100 years (175,200,000 cycles). However, other parts of the railway bridge, especially the steel bearing section can attain life greater than 1e10 cycles (infinite life).
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Keywords
Fatigue, Fatigue life, Failure, Pre-stressed Concrete, Pre-stress Losses and Railway Bridge.