Fatigue performance prediction of S235 base steel plates in the riveted connections

Although several old riveted bridges served more than 100-150 years in the world, some of them are still in the application, generally limited by the economic budget or cultural relic protection reason. Hence, the status of those bridges needed to be evaluated to support the bridge management and rehabilitation, especially with the increasing traffic flow along with their service life. Nowadays, fatigue detail class 71 in the EN 1993-1-9 is generally recommended to evaluate the fatigue behaviour of the riveted joints. But the predicted fatigue behaviour of riveted connection using the recommended S-N curves is excessive conservative because the differences of connection geometries and materials are not fully considered using the global nominal stress methods. Therefore, in this paper, a two-phase fatigue performance approach based on local strain and Paris law, respectively, fatigue crack initiation and propagation phases, combined with numerical simulation, is an effective surrogate method to predict the fatigue performance of riveted connections, considering the material and geometry effects. A good agreement is observed when compared to numerical simulation with experimental observations.