Shui Su Ravine Bridge Design and its Steel Joint Fatigue Performance Evaluation

Abstract Shui Su Ravine Bridge is built in Bai Shui County in Shaanxi Province, which is a part of the highway linking Heyang and Tongchuan. The bridge has been designed as a composite steel‐concrete truss bridge with 3 spans in total of 240 meters and a deck of 4 lanes. To meet the harsh environmental demand and lessen the future maintenance, the solution adopts the weathering steel Q420qENH similar strength as S420NL in European code. The bridge is erected by incremental launching and post‐installation of the pre‐cast concrete slab. Since the truss segment is all welded, two‐step models have been developed to evaluate the fatigue performance of the steel truss joint. In the simplified two‐dimensional model, Phase‐Field (PF) approach has been implemented to make a full fatigue evaluation of crack propagation in the truss.