Fatigue reliability assessment of ageing railway truss bridges: Rationality of probabilistic stress-life approach

Abstract Rail authorities all over the world are paying attention to extend the service lives of railway bridges. The famous Miner’s rule employed deterministic or probabilistic fatigue assessment approaches are generally used to predict remaining fatigue life of ageing railway bridges. Under many variable amplitude loading conditions, life predictions have been found to be unreliable since Miner’s rule does not properly take account the loading sequence effect. Therefore, this paper presents a comparison of a new probabilistic fatigue assessment approach with deterministic approach consisting of a new damage indicator, which captures the loading sequence effect of variable amplitude loads more precisely than the Miner’s rule. The comparison is performed by applying both fatigue assessment approaches to predict the remaining fatigue life of an ageing railway bridge. This comparison intends to conclude the possibility of capturing uncertainty behind loading sequence effect by proposed probabilistic fatigue assessment approach. Initially the paper presents the both approaches. Then the proposed approaches are applied to predict the fatigue lives of an ageing railway bridge. Finally predicted fatigue lives are compared and rationality, significance and validity of the proposed approaches are discussed.