Safety evaluation for inclined cable of existing cable-stayed bridges

In view of the fact that steel cables for cable-stayed bridges are susceptible to corrosion damage and tend to get stress relaxation after long-term service, it is essential to be considered the time-dependent effects into consideration in structural analysis to ensure safety of the existing bridges. However, most of the recent methods are based on the cable material in perfect state and the effects of time-dependent behavior associated with cable corrosion and stress relaxation are neglected, which makes the application of the current methods difficult in dealing with in-service cable structures. By introducing equivalent strain principle and geometric damage theory, the corrosion mechanism of cable is described. A cable-damage model for safety evaluation in long-span cable-stayed bridges is presented. With the approach, cable corrosion as well as stress relaxation effect has been taken into account in the structural analysis, which leads to good precision and validate a new approach to evaluate the safety of cables in existing cable-stayed bridges, and it also could be applied in structural health monitoring of long-span cable-stayed bridges.