Effect of Deck Deterioration on Overall System Behavior, Resilience and Remaining Life of Composite Steel Girder Bridges

Abstract

During past few decades, several studies have been conducted to characterize the performance of in-service girder-type bridge superstructures under operating conditions. Few of these efforts have focused on evaluating the actual response of the bridge systems, especially beyond the elastic limit of their behavior, and correlating the impact of damage to the overall system behavior. In practice, most of the in-service bridge superstructures behave elastically under the routine daily traffic; however, existing damage and deteriorating conditions would significantly influence different aspects of the structural performance including reserve capacity, resilience and remaining service-life. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the response of composite steel girder bridges under the effect of subsurface delamination in the reinforced concrete deck. Commercial finite element computer software, ANSYS, was implemented to perform a nonlinear analysis on a representative single-span simply supported bridge superstructure. The system failure characteristics were captured in the numerical models by incorporating different sources of material non-linearities including cracking/crushing in the concrete and plasticity in steel components. Upon validation, non-linear behavior of the system with both intact and degraded configurations was used to evaluate the impact of integrated damage mechanism on the overall system performance. Reserve capacity of this bridge superstructure was also determined with respect to the nominal element-level design capacity. As vision to the future path, this framework can be implemented to evaluate the performance of other in-service bridges degraded under the effect of different damage scenarios, thus providing a mechanism to determine a measure of capacity, resilience and remaining service-life.