Stay Cables under Tension and Fatigue

Pre-stress cables are one of the basic construction elements for lightweight und long-span structure such as pedestrian bridges. Normally cast sockets are used to anchor the main suspension cable of suspension bridges, while swaged terminals are applied as hangers of suspension bridges or arch bridges. Although swaged terminals have become increasingly important for structural engineering and mechanical handling, no technical standards exist either for production or for structural analysis. Owing to the complex behaviour of terminal and wire rope analytical calculations do not exist. Only a few design recommendations are available, which are based on geometric parameters and experimental data. Current standards describe endurance loads for defined rope types and termination such as cast sockets. For safe dimensioning, it is essential to specify tension and fatigue conditions (e.g. stress and amplitude) depending on swage parameter and material. A method of calculation was developed in [1] to estimate the tension and fatigue behaviour of swaged terminals and will be presented in this paper.