VALE Project
Duration : 07.04.2010 – 06.04.2014
Supervisor : Professor Eugen Brühwiler
PhD student : Vasileios Grigoriou
RAILWAY BRIDGES: Trains and progress are passing over most of them for several decades now. If they were humans we would say that they are getting old… but is this true ?
RAILWAY BRIDGES :
Trains and progress are passing over most of them for several decades now. If they were humans we would say that they are getting old… but is this true ?
OBJECTIVE :
To develop a method for damage determination and fatigue safety verification more precise and realistic than conventional ones.
METHODOLOGY MONITORING :
What does actually a component “feel” when trains are passing over the bridge ? How is it strained ? Direct monitoring of loading effects exactly on the critical locations bypasses most of the conservatism inherent in prescribed load models and structural modeling assumptions.
ANALYSIS :
How does damage grow on a particular structural component evolves under a particular traffic regime ? Recorded load effect time histories reflecting characteristic sequences of passages of trains of different types will be analyzed by means of advanced analytical and numerical methods in order to evaluate the corresponding patterns of damage growth as a function of the number of traffic blocks. A traffic block is a sequence of train loads of specific type and passage frequency. Block properties can be considered as probabilistic variables with a distribution characteristic for a traffic regime. Damage growth rate can be expressed naturally as damage growth per block.
MODELING :
Insight acquired from analysis will be used for the development of a model for evaluating damage growth parameters for specific types of components directly from traffic regime and short term monitoring data.
Fig. 2 : A general framework for the evaluation of the evolution of structural reliability with time.