Analysis on the Lateral Creeping of a Curved Concrete Girder Bridge

Abstract

In recent years, the lateral creeping happened from time to time to the curved concrete girder bridges when they are in service. This attracts much attention in the fields of the design, construction, maintenance of this kind of bridges since severe damage or collapse may happen to the whole structure when the lateral creeping displacement is large enough. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis is carried out on the lateral creeping of a curved two-span continuous concrete girder bridge which has been in service for 20 years to find out the possible reasons. A finite element model is appropriately developed for this example bridge using the commercial software Midas/Civil. Taking into account the dead loads, vehicle loads, thermal loads, etc., the safety and reliability of the original design of this bridge is proved first. And then the analysis is carried out for two possible reasons, bearing failure and expansion joints failure, respectively. The results show that the real reason of the bridge lateral creeping is that the expansion joints are stuck by the concrete blocks left when the expansion joints are replaced.