• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.1A
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• pp.75-89
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• 2006

This paper presents a practical and realistic Life-Cycle Cost (LCC) optimum design methodology of steel bridges considering time effect of bridge reliability under environmental stressors such as corrosion and heavy truck traffics. The LCC functions considered in the LCC optimization consist of initial cost, expected life-cycle maintenance cost and expected life-cycle rehabilitation costs including repair/replacement costs, loss of contents or fatality and injury losses, road user costs, and indirect socio-economic losses. For the assessment of the life-cycle rehabilitation costs, the annual probability of failure which depends upon the prior and updated load and resistance histories should be accounted for. For the purpose, Nowak live load model and a modified corrosion propagation model considering corrosion initiation, corrosion rate, and repainting effect are adopted in this study. The proposed methodology is applied to the LCC optimum design problem of an actual steel box girder bridge with 3 continuous spans (40 m+50 m+40 m=130 m), and various sensitivity analyses of types of steel, local corrosion environments, average daily traffic volume, and discount rates are performed to investigate the effects of various design parameters and conditions on the LCC-effectiveness. From the numerical investigation, it has been observed that local corrosion environments and the number of truck traffics significantly influence the LCC-effective optimum design of steel bridges, and thus realized that these conditions should be considered as crucial parameters for the optimum LCC-effective design.