Fatigue Life of Riveted Steel Bridges




Preface and Acknowledgement

This book was originally published in 1994 by the Department of Structural

Engineering, Division of Steel and Timber Structures, at Chalmers University

of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden (with the title “Fatigue Life of Riveted

Railway Bridges’’). It was my doctoral thesis, the result of six years research.

In order to bring it up to date, the findings of research conducted in this

field in between 1995–2009 have been added (both in a separate chapter –

Chapter 8 Modern Research – and as additional references) together with a

set of examples, a list of symbols and an index. In fact, the set of examples

summarize the entire thesis. In collecting material on the research done in

this area in recent years, I have had immense help from associate professor

Mohammad Al-Emrani at Chalmers University of Technology – what would I

do without your help Mohammad! There were a lot of people that I thanked

in the preface of the 1994 version, and I must once again repeat my deepest

gratitude to my supervisor back then, Professor Bo Edlund (today professor

emeritus), for his untiring support and total commitment, but this time I will

take the opportunity to acknowledge those that mean the most to me, namely

my three children, Josefin, Matilda and Petter. At the public defence of my

doctoral thesis, when Josefin was just little more than 18 months old, she

broke free from her mother (who had to concentrate on our second child, our

newly born daughter Matilda) and she came up to me on the podium just after

the presentation had started, which in fact was quite a nice interruption as it

stopped the ceremony for a while and made me relax. This very early interest

in her father’s research showed itself when three years later, at the age of four,

she asked me this question when we were passing under a bridge: “How do

you build up there, dad?’’ Quite a relevant question, and I then did my best

to explain how a bridge is built. In fact, later on I used Josefin’s question for

many years at the start of my introductory lecture in bridge engineering for

the first-year students at Chalmers. When it comes to Matilda, she stunned

her father at a very early age with reflections on life – reflections that he never

would have come up with himself. At the age of eleven she started to teach her

father the possibilities of the computer program Microsoft Paint. Whenever I

said that something was impossible to draw she just said: “Let me show you


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