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At the Institute of Steel Construction (ICOM) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL, Lausanne, a research is in progress to study the applicability of the adhesively bonded composite patch repair technique to riveted steel bridges damaged by fatigue. The effectiveness of this technique was verified by fatigue tests on small and full scale specimens. Fatigue tests show that the application of carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) strip and, eventually, the introduction of a compressive stress by pretension of CFRP strips prior to bonding, produces a significant increment of the remaining fatigue life. Numerical analyses are currently in progress to simulate the fatigue crack propagation in the repaired member. A F.E.M. modelling technique using plate theory and refereed to in the literature as the three layer technique is adopted in order to reduce the computational effort. The goal of this paper is to illustrate the influence of the pretension level and laminas stiffness on the stress intensity factor levels by a parametric numerical analysis.