Search

Damage equivalence factors for deck slabs of steel railway bridges According to EN 1993‐2, the fatigue verification of railway bridges can be based on internal forces due to the standard load model 71. These internal forces are to be multiplied by a dynamic coefficient Φ2 and a damage equivalence factor λ. In this paper, factors λ1 allowing for the damage effect of traffic on quadrilaterally supported plates with torsionally flexible supports at the longitudinal edges as encountered in single‐track railway‐brides in a span range between 10.0 and 27.5 m are derived for three standard traffic situations. The required damage equivalence factors λ are obtained from the factors λ1, considering the annual traffic volume and the requested service life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensor‐based identification of structural stiffness for the design of steel structures Engineering structures are increasingly equipped with sensors for health monitoring. This is particularly evident in the case of infrastructure of the road traffic network, since the bridges are often subjected to higher stresses due to increased traffic volume and load intensity than considered in the original design process. In the future, "intelligent structures" equipped with sensor systems will increasingly contribute to gaining a better understanding of the load‐bearing behavior and the condition of structures. The proper interpretation of monitoring data and their consideration in the design of structures is always demanding and associated with challenges, to which this article is dedicated. In this study, it is shown how sensor data can be utilized to specify the load‐bearing behavior of a structure using a Bayesian approach, and how this integration can be taken into account in the semi‐probabilistic safety concept of the Eurocode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]