Recommended properties of elastic wearing surfaces on orthotrotropic steel decks

Orthotropic decks composed of deck plate, ribs, cross beams and wearing surface are frequently used in industry to span long distances due to their light structures and load carrying capacities. As a result they are broadly preferred in industry and there are a lot of bridges of this type exist in the world. Nevertheless, some of them cannot sustain the anticipated service life and damages in form of cracks develop in steel components and wearing surface. Main reason to these damages is seen as the repetitive wheel loads, namely the fatigue loading. Solutions to this problem could be divided into two categories: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative solutions may be new design methodologies or innovative materials, whereas quantitative solution should be arranging dimensions of deck structure in order to resist wheel loads till the end of service life. Wearing surface on deck plate plays a very important role to avoid or mitigate these damages, since it disperses the load coming on deck structure and increases the bending stiffness of deck plate by forming a composite structure together with it. In this study the effect of Elastic moduli, Poisson ratio and thickness of wearing surface on the stresses emerged in steel deck and wearing surface itself is investigated using a FE-model developed to analyze orthotropic steel bridges.