The Influence Long-Term Operating Load to the Riveted Join Václav Kubec , Josef Hodek , Antonín Prantl and Petr Votápek Abstract The paper deals with the life of the joints in the long-term operational load. For designing and dimensioning is important the feedback that the design was correctly designed and the component was not over-sized or undersized. This feed- back becomes increasingly important, because it is now a trend to design lightweight structures with maximum use of the material. The consequence of this suggestion method is that the established safety margin does not allow for any errors or inaccu- racies. The danger and weak side of this approach is to estimate the long-term life of the designed structure. In the research, we had the opportunity to analyze riveted bridge structure, which has been in operation since 1905. An analysis of the residual stress is published in the paper and is compared with the assumed bias in the newly made construction. The state of the rivet joint after a century operation is judged on the basis of this comparison. Keywords Joining · Riveted joint · Long-term load · Residual stress 1 Introduction The problem of how to join materials together emerged with the first human activities that could be described as manufacturing. Although this problem may seem to have been solved already, research into and development of joining processes are still relevant, particularly due to the ever-increasing number of new materials. In terms of their lifetime, prestressed structures tend to exhibit better properties than those without prestressing. This year, a reconstruction of bridges (see Fig. 1) in a railway station in the Czech city of Pilsen began. Under this project, their riveted steel frames will be replaced with reinforced concrete structures. The bridges have been in use since 1905, over V. Kubec (B ) · J. Hodek · A. Prantl COMTES FHT a.s., Pr ˚ umyslová 995, 33401 Dobˇ rany, Czech Republic e-mail: vkubec@comtesfht.cz P. Votápek University of West Bohemia, Univerzitní 22, 30614 Plzeˇ n, Czech Republic e-mail: pvotapek@kks.zcu.cz © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Š. Medvecký et al. (eds.), Current Methods of Construction Design, Lecture Notes in Mechanical Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33146-7_36 317