Remaining Life of Orthotropic Steel Bridge Decks

This article deals with one of several research projects that focused on steel bridges made with orthotropic decks. This project specifically looked at the growth of cracks, as well as development of a model to predict such cracking in orthotropic decks and the amount of remaining life of the bridge deck. Due to the complexity of the problem, the experiments and numerical analysis supporting the study were carried out in 5 phases, which are outlined and described herein.