The stay cables are generally regarded as the most critical component of the cable-stayed bridges. Normal vehicle loads will cause fatigue damage of the cables made of parallel steel wire. In addition, the stay cables also suffer from the challenges of corrosion, fatigue and their coupled effects. Therefore it is important to detect the damage of wires with the cables before the cables fails catastrophically. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is now regarded as an essential tool to evaluate the status of the structure. In this paper, a corroded parallel steel wire, which are removed from a real bridge, was carried out under the fatigue loading to simulate the damage procedure, i.e. the producing and propagation of damage or crack. Piezoelectric transformers bonded to the cable are used to monitor and evaluate the damage propagation during the test. Moreover, the fatigue properties of corroded parallel wire cable are investigated in this paper.

Date Published: 8 April 2009
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7294, Nondestructive Characterization for Composite Materials, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Infrastructure, and Homeland Security 2009, 729416 (8 April 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.817479

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7294:
Nondestructive Characterization for Composite Materials, Aerospace Engineering, Civil Infrastructure, and Homeland Security 2009
H. Felix Wu; Aaron A. Diaz; Peter J. Shull; Dietmar W. Vogel, Editor(s)