The structural behaviour of horizontally curved prestressed concrete box girder bridges

AlHamaidah, ASM 2017, The structural behaviour of horizontally curved prestressed concrete box girder bridges , PhD thesis, University of Salford.

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Abstract

Bridges are important and efficient structures which are comprised of a number of elements and substructures, namely the deck, abutment and foundation and possibly additional intermediate supports. Recently the horizontally curved box girder bridge has become more desirable in modern motorway systems and big cities. Even though numerous amounts of research have been in progress to analyse and understand the behaviour of all types of box-girder bridges, the results from these different research projects are unevaluated and dispersed.

Therefore, a clear understanding of an accurate study on straight and curved box-girder bridges is needed. In this study, a three dimensional straight and horizontally curved prestressed box section has been analysed with shell elements using the finite element analysis program ANSYS to examine structural behaviour and load carrying capacity. The box girder under static gravity, pre-stressed and gravity + pre-stressed loading has been analysed. The model which has been investigated in this report is taken from a published paper and expanded to study the effects of curvature under different loads applied (UDLs). The report concludes that the FEA using shell elements is able to predict the behaviour of box girders with adequate accuracy through the comparisons made between stress results from analytical hand calculations and published work, both for the straight and curved box girder bridges.

Further theoretical and analytical investigations have been carried out to study the effects of parameters such as horizontal curvature, prestressing, and traffic patterning. For this purpose, a new model was created, modelled with an accurate prestress representation and analysed as a three-dimensional model using the ANSYS.

This thesis presents a complete description of the bridge system, addressing the aforementioned parameters and presenting the results through graphs of stress distribution, and displacement. Recommendations for the practical use of FE for bridge design are discussed.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Schools:	Schools > School of Computing, Science and Engineering
Funders:	The Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq
Depositing User:	Alyaa Shatti AlHamaidah
Date Deposited:	21 Feb 2018 09:12
Last Modified:	21 Mar 2018 01:38
URI:	http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/43834

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