Abstract
Fatigue cracks have been reported in I-beam ends of railway steel bridges, which occur at a lower end of an I-beam web. As a temporary countermeasure, the crack is typically repaired with a drilling hole at its tip, called a stop-hole method. In the cracked I-beam ends, however, the effect of life extension due to a stop-hole has not been clearly evaluated yet. In this study, the life extension of cracked I-beams by applying a stop-hole was investigated through fatigue tests using an actual I-beam bridge removed from the field. And also, in order to make sure local stress distribution around the stop-hole in the test, finite element analyses were performed. As a result, it was proven that the fatigue life of the repaired I-beam can be predicted from the local stress range at the stop-hole edge. Furthermore, it was revealed that the maximum stress along a stop-hole tends to decrease as a crack becomes long, meaning that the effect of the stop-hole varies depending on crack length.
