Fatigue strength assessment of riveted shear splices

Old‐steel riveted bridges are part of the heritage asset in many countries. Assessing the remaining life and fatigue strength of their structural riveted details is crucial in managing these structures. According to JRC‐ECCS document Assessment of Existing Steel Structures: Recommendations for Estimation of Remaining Fatigue Life, fatigue class 71 is recommended to estimate the fatigue strength of riveted details. However, the predicted fatigue behaviour can lead to excessively conservative estimates. Hence the research community is still focusing on the suitability of current recommendations. This work performs a numerical study to evaluate the fatigue strength of riveted double‐shear splices. Experimental fatigue test results are collected from the literature, and some are used to develop a finite element model in ABAQUS and Fe‐Safe. The adopted modelling fatigue approach is applied to investigate the fatigue behaviour of double‐shear riveted connections with different geometrical properties. The numerical results are compared with all collected data, showing the procedure's effectiveness in predicting the fatigue strength of double‐shear riveted splices. Finally, the numerical and experimental results are compared with the recommended S‐N curves.