ABSTRACT
In order to obtain a reliable life-cycle risk profile for steel bridges subjected to corrosion, time- variant reliability of these bridges needs to be quantified in an accurate manner. This requires an accurate as- sessment of corrosion material loss in the form of steel plate thinning. Numerous corrosion models have been proposed to predict the time-variant thickness loss of steel plates, including both linear and nonlinear models. Among all these models, linear corrosion model, due to its relative simplicity, has been adopted in many previous studies on reliability/risk assessment. This paper aims to quantify the influence of nonlinearity of thickness loss on the risk analysis of a composite steel bridge subjected to corrosion hazard. The results provide an insight on the plausibility of using the linear corrosion model to quantify the corrosion material loss.
