Abstract
A finite segment method is presented to analyze the mechanical behavior of skewed box girders. By modeling the top and bottom plates of the segments with skew plate beam element under an inclined coordinate system and the webs with normal plate beam element, a spatial elastic displacement model for skewed box girder is constructed, which can satisfy the compatibility condition at the corners of the cross section for box girders. The formulation of the finite segment is developed based on the variational principle. The major advantage of the proposed approach, in comparison with the finite element method, is that it can simplify a three-dimensional structure into a one-dimensional structure for structural analysis, which results in significant saving in computational times. At last, the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed finite segment method are verified by a model test.
Highlights
The continued economic development and increasing investment in infrastructure in China has resulted in a marked improvement in construction standards for transportation networks throughout the country
The commercial finite element program ANSYS 14.0 was used to validate the accuracy of the proposed finite segment method (FSM)
The skewed box girder structure is divided into 10 skewed box girder segments so that each segment of the bridge is subjected to nodal loads only
Summary
The continued economic development and increasing investment in infrastructure in China has resulted in a marked improvement in construction standards for transportation networks throughout the country. Scordelis et al [7] presented the theoretical and experimental results of a 45∘ skew two-span four-cell reinforced concrete box girder bridge model with a 1 : 2.82 scale. The measured bridge response under the test load was used to develop and calibrate a FEM model by using ANSYS software. It is important to develop a practical FEM to reduce the amount of computational work for the analysis of the skewed box girder bridges. Finite segment method has been used to simplify a three-dimensional thin-walled box girder into a one-dimensional structure for curved box girder analysis [16]. To verify the accuracy of the proposed finite segment method (FSM), the results obtained using this approach were compared with the results obtained by using ANSYS and the tested results from a modal test
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