Prediction of fatigue life of a bolted joint in railway steel arch bridge using multiaxial fatigue criteria

Fatigue represents a critical condition for infrastructure subjected to repeated cyclic loads, such as steel railway bridges. The literature offers several methods to estimate fatigue life, consisting of three main phases: cycle counting, fatigue damage criterion, and damage accumulation criterion. Applying S-N curves might not be conservative in the case of railway bridges subjected to traffic because the stress-time history is complex and cannot be reduced to a sinusoidal history. Additionally, the presence of a multiaxial stress state must be considered. Therefore, this work compares eight multiaxial fatigue damage criteria for evaluating fatigue life in a scenario between high and low-cycle fatigue. Specifically, the authors considered four low-cycle fatigue criteria, namely Smith–Watson–Topper (SWT), Kandil, Brown and Miller (KBM), Glinka, Fatemi and Socie (FS), and four high-cycle fatigue criteria, Crossland, Basquin and the methods recommended by Eurocode 3 and British Standard. The rainflow counting method in ASTM E1049-85 (2011) and Miner’s rule for damage accumulation were used. The Polcevera railway steel bridge was selected as a case study. A 3D numerical model was developed for this purpose using Midas Civil software, taking into account the material non-linearity of the bridge’s elements. Once the area with the highest stress concentration was identified, a detailed analysis was conducted to estimate the stress and strain time histories induced by train traffic. A sensitivity analysis was conducted after critically comparing the eight methods for predicting fatigue life to assess the impact of traffic parameters, train velocity, axle load, and convoy length on fatigue life. It has been found that the criteria considering axial stress tend to overestimate the number of fatigue cycles to failure compared to the criteria, including the effect of shear stress components.