2026 Volume 5 Issue 1 Pages 166-173
Recently, a monitoring method has been proposed that evaluates fatigue crack initiation and propagation by measuring the static strain of steel structures without loading. However, in actual bridges, static strain also changes due to temperature changes in a day, which may affect fatigue crack evaluation. In this study, a reduction method of temperature effects in measuring static strains is proposed, where two strain gauges are placed near the target locations, and the difference in static strain measured at each position is analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed method was verified through fatigue tests and monitoring in actual bridges. As a result, it was found that the proposed method can significantly reduce strain changes caused by temperature effects while still capturing strain changes due to crack initiation and propagation.
