A state-of-the-art review on fatigue life assessment of steel bridges

Abstract

Fatigue is among the most critical forms of damage potentially occurring in steel bridges, while accurate assessment or prediction of the fatigue damage status as well as the remaining fatigue life of steel bridges is still a challenging and unsolved issue. There have been numerous investigations on the fatigue damage evaluation and life prediction of steel bridges by use of deterministic or probabilistic methods. The purpose of this review is devoted to presenting a summary on the development history and current status of fatigue condition assessment of steel bridges, containing basic aspects of fatigue, classical fatigue analysis methods, data-driven fatigue life assessment, and reliability-based fatigue condition assessment. © 2014 X. W. Ye et al.