Abstract
In plate girder railway bridges with open deck system, the local corrosion on the upper flange under sleepers is well-known as a typical damage, which makes the ultimate strength decreases significantly. This paper presents a simple evaluation method for remaining strength of plate girder with local corrosion under sleepers. The remaining bending strength can be obtained as the minimum value among the strengths based on the several buckling modes of the compressive flange. Then the remaining strength of the plate girder is finally obtained by the interaction curve between ultimate patch-load strength and the bending strength. Comparing with the remaining strengths both of loading tests and nonlinear FEM analyses, it can be concluded that the method proposed herein can evaluate the remaining strength of the corroded plate girder reliably.
