TY - JOUR A1 - Helmerich, Rosemarie A1 - Kühn, B. A1 - Nussbaumer, A. T1 - Assessment of existing steel structures - A guideline for estimation of the remaining fatigue life JF - Structure & infrastructure engineering N2 - In many countries and regions, traffic infrastructure projects suffer from low funding. The budget is tight for new infrastructure building and, thus, the importance of inspection, maintenance and assessment of the existing traffic infrastructure increases. A new fatigue assessment guideline for the estimation of the remaining fatigue life of steel bridges has been written by technical committee 6 of the European Convention of Constructional Steelwork (ECCS). It will be a useful tool for the complementation of bridge management systems, used commonly for condition assessment. Design specifications and rules are harmonised throughout Europe. They are under constant development, but there is still a lack of forwarding and concentrating experiences as well as developing rules for the fatigue assessment on existing steel structures. This paper presents a guideline with a proposed fatigue assessment procedure for existing steel structures embedded in information about old materials and non-destructive testing methods for the evaluation of details (ECCS 2004, Assessment of existing steel structures). Particular attention is paid on remedial measures which are proposed for weak details and damages caused by fatigue. The developed fatigue assessment procedure can be applied to existing steel structures under cyclic loading in general, but the guideline concentrates on the existing traffic infrastructure made from old steel, because of the public importance. The proposed procedure summarizes, regroups and arranges the knowledge in the field of assessment on existing steel to be applied by practicing engineers. The procedure is a milestone in knowledge transfer from a state of scientific knowledge to state-of-the-art. KW - Fatigue KW - Assessment KW - Maintenance KW - Reliability KW - Material KW - Old steel KW - Remedial measures KW - Existing steel structures PY - 2007 SN - 1573-2479 SN - 1744-8980 VL - 3 IS - 3 SP - 245 EP - 255 PB - Taylor & Francis CY - London AN - OPUS4-15042 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - RPRT A1 - Kühn, B. A1 - Lukic, M. A1 - Nussbaumer, A. A1 - Günther, H.P. A1 - Helmerich, Rosemarie A1 - Herion, S. A1 - Kolstein, M.H. A1 - Walbridge, S. A1 - Androic, B. A1 - Dijkstra, O. A1 - Bucak, Ö. A1 - Sedlacek, G. A1 - Bijlaard, F. A1 - Géradin, M. A1 - Pinto, A. A1 - Dimova, S. T1 - Assessment of existing steel structures - Recommendations for estimation of remaining fatigue life T2 - JRC Scientific and Technical Reports / EUR - Scientific and Technical Research series KW - Assessment KW - Existing steel structures PY - 2008 SN - 1018-5593 SP - 1 EP - 108 PB - Office for Official Publications of the European Communities CY - Luxembourg AN - OPUS4-17556 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -