A Stochastic Modeling Method for Three-Dimensional Corrosion Pits of Bridge Cable Wires and Its Application

Cables have usually served as critical and vulnerable structural components in long-span cable-supported bridges. Cable inspections revealed that corrosion, fatigue, or coupled corrosion-fatigue were the ones of the main failure mechanisms. This paper proposed a stochastic modeling method for three-dimensional (3D) corrosion pits of high-strength bridge wires, which can be applied to rapid fatigue life evaluation according to mass loss caused by surface corrosion pits of bridge wires nondestructively. High-strength steel wire specimens dismantled from the cable-stayed bridge served for 15 y were scanned to obtain the original surface corrosion data. The spatial position coordinates of corrosion pits were considered as a random variable and can be well-fitted by uniform distribution. While the number of corrosion pits can be fitted with a generalized extreme value distribution. The uniform corrosion depth d, which can be equivalent to mass loss rate, was calculated as the input corrosion parameter for 3D corrosion pit modeling. The maximum pitting depth d for the steel wire was found to be associated with d. The geometric parameters for individual corrosion pits were recognized as pit depth d, depth-to-width ratio d/b, and aspect ratio b/a, which were fitted with different probability distributions. What follows is 3D spatial corrosion pits simulation based on the individual corrosion parameters that were sampled and combined from the corresponding probabilistic distributions. Hereafter, the fatigue life evaluation of corroded wires was conducted based on an equivalent surface defect method and compared with the experimental results, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed modeling approaches.