ABSTRACT
In stay cable and extradosed bridges, cables exhibit micromovement under live loads such as wind and traffic. This micromovement can be critical in some structural parts, for example in friction saddles. In this type of saddle, continuous strands located on the opposite sides of the saddle are usually subjected to different forces, leading to micromovement of the strands. In the long term, this cyclic micromovement results in fretting fatigue between the strands and/or between the strand and the hosting element. Strand failure could consequently occur. Even though some improvements have been adopted for the friction saddle design to reduce such risk, fretting fatigue is still not completely eliminated and studies prove that it could result in main tensile element failure. Therefore, this paper focuses the fretting fatigue phenomenon in friction saddles and subsequently several solutions for mitigating or even completely eliminating it are proposed and evaluated.
