Abstract
Highly curved steel-box bridges are usually constructed as ramp structures for the highway interchange and metropolitan elevated highway junction, but a number of these bridges are deteriorated and damaged to a significant degree due to heavy traffic. The main objective of the study is to develop a practical reliability-based assessment of safety and residual load carrying-capacity of existing curved steel-box ramp bridges. In the paper, for the realistic assessment of safety and residual load carrying-capacity of deteriorated and/or damaged curved steel-box bridges, an interactive non-linear limit state model is formulated based on the von Mises's combined stress yield criterion. It is demonstrated that the proposed model is effective for the assessment of reliability-based safety and the evaluation of residual load carrying-capacity of curved steel-box bridges. In addition, this study comparatively shows the applicability of various reliability analysis methods, and suggests a practical and effective one to be used in practice.