Repair with splice plate for fatigue crack at vertical stiffener of orthotropic steel deck using bearing type bolt

Abstract

One of the typical fatigue cracks in orthotropic steel deck is observed at the top end of vertical stiffener. This study investigates the repair and retrofit for those fatigue cracking with the newly developed method with L-shaped splice plate. The main characteristics of this method are followings: (1) bearing type bolt is used for lifting up L-shaped splice plate, (2) detail of L-shape splice plate itself is modified to facilitate the maintenance process and also to gurantee the effectiveness of this application. This paper reports the results of static test, filed test and fatigue tests conducted for evaluating the applicability of the proposed method.