Stress-Strength Interference Method Applied for the Fatigue Design of Tower Cranes

Crane owners want to maximize the efficiency of their equipment and teams on a construction site in order to minimize the amount of time needed to complete their work. This leads to very intensive crane use and stress on crane structures made primarily of welded steel elements (plates and beams). Therefore, it is necessary for Structural Engineers to consider fatigue resistance during the design process. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the utility of a probabilistic approach for a better optimization of the fatigue design of tower cranes elements (e.g. jib elements).