Experimental study on fatigue performance of corroded high-strength steel wires used in bridges

This paper presents an experimental research on the fatigue performance of corroded high-strength steel wires used in bridges. Three dimensional (3D) profile measurements and fatigue tests were conducted on the steel wires on six corrosion levels. It is found that the experimental pitting depth followed a normal distribution and both the location and scale parameters increased with the corrosion degree. The fatigue test results indicated that corrosion could cause a significant decrease in the fatigue life of corroded steel wires. The S-N curves were bilinear in the log-log scale and the logarithmized fatigue life decreased linearly with the corrosion degree. An empirical formula for fatigue life calculation was established considering the corrosion effect. A method based on 3D measurements and AFGROW software was proposed to predict the remaining fatigue life of corroded steel wires. The predicted fatigue lives agreed well with the test results.