Safety assessment method of inclined cables for long-span cable-stayed bridges

In view of the fact that inclined cables of cable-stayed bridge are susceptible to corrosion and tend to become stress relaxation after long-term service, it is essential to take those damage effects into considerations in structural analysis to ensure the safety of the existing bridges. By introducing Lemaitre's equivalent-strain principle and geometrical damage theory in this paper, a cable-damage model for safety assessment of inclined cables of long-span cable-stayed bridges are presented. With the approach in this paper, cable corrosion as well as stress relaxation has been taken into account, which leads to good precision and provides a new approach to assess the safety of cables in cable-stayed bridges, and it could be applied in structural health monitoring of long-span cable-stayed bridges.