The orthotropic steel bridge deck weld structure would easily cause fatigue cracking under the repeated action of vehicle load. This paper took the steel box girder in a bridge as a research object, researched the mechanical properties of the steel plate and the microstructure of the welded joint, then designed the fatigue specimens of the deck plate and did the fatigue test. The Δσ-N curves and stress amplitudes of the weld details of the deck plate with U-rib and diaphragm under different probabilities of survival were obtained. After extended the Δσ-N curves to the long life range, the fatigue damage calculation equation of the detail was proposed, and the cut-off limit under the 50% and 97.7% probability of survival were 81.50 MPa and 53.11 MPa, respectively. Based on the actual vehicle load spectrum and simplified finite element model of the steel box girder section, the stress amplitude of the details of the weld joint was calculated. The calculation result shows that the maximum stress amplitude of the concerned point was 38.29 MPa, less than the cut-off limit. It means that the fatigue strength of the details of the weld joint meet the requirement of the fatigue design.

By means of finite element modeling (FEM) and fatigue experiments, we study the fatigue performance of the rounded welding region between the diaphragm plate and closed rib of orthotropic steel bridge deck in this work. A local sub-model of the rounded welding region from the orthotropic steel bridge deck was developed to analyze the stress distributions. Based on the analysis results we designed the fatigue specimen for the fatigue test of this detailed structure. The fatigue experimental results revealed that the crack initiates from the weld toe of the rounded welding region and the stress concentration at the rounded welding region is the main mechanism of fatigue crack initiation. In addition, we propose three improvements to reduce the stress concentration of the rounded welding region, and the local structure optimization scheme of the diaphragm–rib weld can effectively improve the fatigue resistance of the detailed weld structure.

The temperature dependence of the fracture toughness J_C of a three-dimensional (3D) random fibrous (RF) material, with a porosity of 87% along the through-the-thickness (TTT) direction, was investigated using experiments and the finite element method (FEM) in this study. The temperature considered ranges from 299 to 1273 K. The experimental observations revealed the fracture toughness J_C with crack length-to-width ratios of 0.4 and 0.5, which increased from 47.32 to 328.28 J/m² and from 44.92 to 280.09 J/m², respectively, as the temperature increased. Then, a 3D FE model, considering the meso-morphology characteristics of the 3D RF material, was developed to simulate a size-scaled compact tension (CT) specimen with a single edge crack. Using the elastic modulus and the fracture strength of the silica fibers at room temperature, we verified the effectiveness of the FE model, then predicted the fracture strength of the silica fibers and the bonding between the fibers at elevated temperatures. In addition, our developed FE model proved to successfully simulate the fracture toughness J_C from 299 to 1273 K and reveal the deformation mechanism of the 3D RF material at different temperatures.