The aim of this study is to test the fatigue resistance through laboratory tests of the proposed reinforcement for a railway bridge and to define the requirements for its realization.
Swiss Federal Railways Lausanne and the Resilient Steel Structures Laboratory (RESSLab) collaborated to check and optimize a particular type of reinforcement of a railway bridge. This reinforcement consists of grinding the ends of the additional soles of the main beams and then re-welding new sheets to the nearest existing ones. In this way, additional continuous soles are recreated, without ends, and therefore more resistant to fatigue. This detail will be used to reinforce an existing Swiss Federal Railways bridge in Zug region and is likely to be reused for other bridges in Switzerland.
The results of this study will also be used to define a new category of detail and related manufacturing requirements.
| Principal investigators | Profs. Alain Nussbaumer and Dimitrios Lignos |
| Sponsor | SBB CFF FFS |
| Period | 2016 |
| Laboratory | RESSLab |
| Collaboration | TRACE |