Remaining service life prediction of riveted wrought iron railway bridges using system reliability approach

Abstract

Over the last decade, structural reliability based analysis and design methods have become widely accepted among researchers and increasingly acknowledged among practicing engineers. A significant amount of research has been performed on condition assessment of existing bridges, yet the data obtained from this research have not been incorporated into the bridge management databases. In fact, there has been considerably little progress in estimation of remaining service life of bridges using this approach. This study proposes methodology to predict the remaining service life and estimate condition of riveted wrought iron railway bridges based on above theory. Initially, based on the field studies and subjective inferences, two failure models are proposed to describe time dependent performances of these bridges. Quantities in the proposed models are assumed to be random variables with appropriate probabilistic distributions. In this context, two proposed models are combined to yield a system reliability model. Then, general methodology is proposed to find out remaining service life and condition estimation based on this system reliability approach. A case study bridge is selected from the national railway network of Sri Lanka and the proposed methodology is demonstrated on the bridge, in order to find out remaining service life of its different components.