Fatigue testing of a bolted connection for buried flexible steel culverts

A fatigue assessment of steel structures based on the safe life approach requires a detail category representing the fatigue strength. For flexible culverts there are no matching details in the governing regulations. In this paper the testing and evaluation of the fatigue strength of a standardized bolted connection for steel culverts are presented. A test rig was designed to mimic the in-service conditions with a combination of bending moment and axial force. A total of ten specimens was tested to failure. The failure was governed cracks initiating at the indentations from the bolt heads and propagated towards the nearest edge. From the test results, an S-N curve has been derived suggesting a characteristic fatigue strength of 124 MPa at 2 million cycles and a slope of 5 in log-log scale.