Original Research Article Fatigue assessment procedure for old riveted road bridges Mieszko Kużawa * , Tomasz Kamiński, Jan Bień Department of Civil Engineering, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland 1. Introduction Riveted bridges were constructed over a period of more than 100 years until the 1950s. There are thousands of riveted bridges throughout Europe still in service and they play an important role in many transportation networks. Many of these old structures have undergone several phases of repair or strengthening after being damaged during the World Wars or due to changes of service requirements. As a consequence of increasing traffic demands, despite of their advanced age, the existing riveted road bridges have been intensively exploited during the previous decades, what affected their safety, operability and durability. Especially the fatigue phenomenon is one of the most common mechanism of deterioration of riveted bridges leading to failure [4]. In literature [5–8] all known collapses of steel bridges during service are analysed proving that approximately 38% of about 130 of cases was caused by fatigue. In Canada, for example [9], the causes of severe damage of steel bridge superstructures in years 1987–1996 were: over- loads (8 structures), fatigue (12) and other (18). Therefore issues a r c h i v e s o f c i v i l a n d m e c h a n i c a l e n g i n e e r i n g 1 8 ( 2 0 1 8 ) 1 – 1 6 a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 19 September 2017 Accepted 23 March 2018 Available online Keywords: Riveted road bridge Experimental load test Fatigue analysis a b s t r a c t The paper proposes a comprehensive, experimentally supported fatigue evaluation proce- dure dedicated to old riveted road bridges. The presented fatigue assessment of old riveted structures, very often of high historical value, is performed according to general assump- tions of the Eurocodes [1,2] and the European Recommendations for Estimation of Remaining Fatigue Life of Existing Steel Structures [3]. Essential input data used for estimation of the fatigue damage accumulation in critical bridge components as well as for prediction of residual lifetime of the whole structure is based on experimental vibration tests performed under real live loads. An original approach related to the experiment-based adaptation of the stan- dardised fatigue loads [1,2] to the individual operating conditions of each structure is proposed and defined in details. Its practical implementation is described in a case study of a typical historical 80-year-old road bridge crossing the Vistula River in Puławy in Poland. In the previous decades, the bridge despite of its advanced age and historical value was intensively exploited by heavy vehicles. Thus, taking into account the age of the structure and intensity of the traffic crossing the bridge the remaining fatigue resistance of the bridge critical members was evaluated by means of the proposed procedure. © 2018 Politechnika Wrocławska. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mieszko.kuzawa@pwr.edu.pl (M. Kużawa), tomasz.kaminski@pwr.edu.pl (T. Kamiński), jan.bien@pwr.edu.pl (J. Bień). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/acme https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acme.2018.03.005 1644-9665/© 2018 Politechnika Wrocławska. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.