Corrosion Damage Assessment for Simply Supported Steel-Concrete Composite Bridges

In Japan, there are more than 50,000 steel railway bridges, where more than half of them have been used over 60 years and some bridges are aged over 100 years. With aging, corrosion becomes one of the major causes of steel deterioration, and its damages seriously affect the durability of steel bridges. On this background, a collapsed steel-concrete composite bridge due to severe corrosion was investigated by using finite element method. Measured corrosion data after the bridge collapse was considered in the numerical simulation, and the failure process was simulated. In addition, parametric analysis was conducted to confirm the contributions of different section loss (due to corrosion) locations to the bridge collapse. The present results in this paper can be used for maintenance and management of existing steel-concrete composite bridges and also can be used for designing new steel-concrete composite bridge structures with higher redundancy.