Establishment and application of a fatigue crack database for steel box girders

Fatigue cracks commonly occur on the steel box girders of long-span bridges, while are barely summarized and analyzed in a statistic way due to the non-standard records on reports. This paper proposes to establish a standardized database of cracks on steel box girders from multiple data sources. The data are collected from 7 bridges, while 4 of them provide the inspection reports for 28 years in accumulation. By conducting the data specification and standardization, a tuple containing 15 parameters is proposed to store the information of each crack. The crack categorization is then carried out, resulting in 6 series and 34 types. In addition, the analysis module is proposed for the database to show the crack properties in various aspects, including the longitudinal and transverse distribution of the cracks, and the growing process of the crack length. It can be concluded that the database in its current form can benefit bridge management and maintenance in practice. Moreover, it lays the foundation for building the knowledge graph of cracks on steel box girders in the future, which can be helpful in predicting the crack behavior in both data-driven and mechanical ways.