Secondary Stress based-Remaining Fatigue Life Estimation of a Riveted Bridge Connection using New Fatigue Criterion

This paper presents a new method to estimate the remaining fatigue lives of riveted connections of railway bridges. The proposed method mainly consists of secondary stress histories, recently developed sequential law and fully known Wohler curve. It is essential to use the fully known Wohler curve. Therefore the technique, which utilizes the transfer of the partially known code given Wohler curve to a fully known curve, is also discussed. Initially the details of new damage indicator based sequential law and it's proposed extension for multiaxial fatigue is described. Secondly the remaining fatigue life of an existing riveted bridge connection is estimated by introducing a new method. Hence validity and merits of the proposed method is confirmed by comparing the results with previous methods-based fatigue lives.