Fatigue life of precast decks of high speed railway bridges

Abstract

Fatigue verification doesn't govern the design of the majority of civil engineering structures, but, in the case of railway bridges (namely those constructed with prefabricated beams) fatigue needs to be taken into account because of the high value and the cyclic nature of the traffic actions. The main objective of the present paper is the identification of the critical points where fatigue verification is more severe than ultimate limit state verification, in the case of railway bridge decks constructed with precast "U" beams carrying heavy freight traffic.