Fatigue Evaluation of Rib-to-Deck Welded Joints of Orthotropic Steel Bridge Deck

This study reported fatigue test results of 300-mm-wide specimens with three details: 80% partial joint penetration (80%PJP), weld melt-through (WMT), and both. The specimens were cut out from full-scale orthotropic deck specimens of 16-mm-thick deck plate. In the fatigue test, the deck plate was subjected to cyclic bending loading and the rib was free from loading. The fatigue fracture surfaces showed that the presence of WMT may affect the initiation of fatigue cracks. A propensity to root cracking rather than toe cracking was observed. Plotting fatigue test results in an S-N diagram showed that the specimens with WMT seemed to have slightly lower fatigue strengths than the 80%PJP specimens, but the difference is more likely to be within a usual scatter of test data, which means that both details have comparable fatigue strength. The present test results satisfied the S-N curves of JSSC-E (80 MPa at 2x10(6) cycles) or AASHTO-C (89 MPa at 2x10(6) cycles). DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)BE.1943-5592.0000181. (C) 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.