A Study of Fatigue Life Evaluation for the Servicing Railway Steel Bridge

정성분석기법을 이용한 공용중인 강철도교의 잔존피로수명평가에 관한 연구

Most design practices have not taken advantage of the advanced theories in the modern fracture mechanics and finite element analysis due to complexity of analysis as well as the large quantity of vaguely defined parameters in actual designs. This paper considers fatigue problems in bridge structures using effective analytical and design tools from the field of qualitative constraint reasoning. A set of software modules was developed for fatigue analysis ,and evaluation, which is easily applicable in engineering practices of bridge designers. The software modules integrate techniques in the field of knowledge representation and qualitative reasoning, into the conventional fatigue analysis. The techniques enable the use complex analysis formulations to tackle practical problems with uncertainties, and present the design outcome in two-dimensional design space. Appropriate engineering assumptions and judgments in carrying out these procedures, often the most difficult part for practicing engineers, can be partially produced by using qualitative reasoning to define the trends and ranges, interval constraint analysis to derive the controlling parameters, as well as design space to account for practical experience. This paper depicts a way of complex analysis to practical engineering designs with qualitative reasoning.