Assessment of Existing Steel Structures – Recommendations for Estimation of the Remaining Fatigue Life

Abstract In many countries and regions, the traffic infrastructure projects suffer from low funding. There budget is tight for new infrastructure building and, thus, the importance of inspection, maintenance and assessment of the existing traffic infrastructure increases. A new fatigue assessment guideline for the estimation of the remaining fatigue life of steel bridges has been written by technical committee 6 from ECCS [1] . It will be a useful tool for the complementation of bridge management systems, used commonly for condition assessment. This paper presents a guideline with a proposed fatigue assessment procedure for existing steel structures embedded in information about old materials and non-destructive testing methods for the evaluation of details. Particular attention is paid on remedial measures which are proposed for weak details and damages caused by fatigue. The developed fatigue assessment procedure can be applied to existing steel structures under cyclic loading in general, but the guideline concentrates on the existing traffic infrastructure made from old steel, because of the public importance. The proposed procedure summarizes, regroups and arranges the knowledge in the field of assessment on existing steel to be applied by practicing engineers. The procedure is a milestone in knowledge transfer from a state of scientific knowledge to state-of-the-art. To this end the presented JRC-ECCS-Joint Report has been published. In meantime the Technical Committee is working on a 2 nd edition of these recommendations. The keynote will also presents the new extensions of the recommendations e.g. dealing with the specifics in an assessment of existing crane structures or wind power plants or dealing with information on actual retrofitting techniques for orthotropic bridge decks.