Abstract
Important investments have been made worldwide in the modernization and construction of railway lines. Plans for new constructions have also been laid out. Recently, precast concrete has been widely employed in the construction of railway bridges and viaducts. Several precast solutions have been applied, namely: I-shaped or U-shaped precast girders and uni-cellular or bi-cellular precast box girders. Regarding the structural scheme in the longitudinal direction, either simple span or continuous decks have been used. In this context, this work aims to contribute to the knowledge about the real performance of these structures through the development of a laboratory tests setup, for the study of this type of structure, focusing on the connection between the precast beams. The setup will be implemented at the Laboratory of Earthquake and Structural Engineering (LESE), several experimental campaigns on the cyclic behaviour of reinforced concrete elements have been carried out.
Highlights
In the study of the behaviour of high-speed railway bridges built with precast beams, fatigue strength is one of the most important design criteria (Sousa et al 2013)
This paper presents the first part of the study, and starts with an extensive literature survey about experimental test campaigns to assess the mechanical performance of connections between precast bridge beams
The purpose of this paper is to present the first stage of the experimental campaign to be carried out within the scope of the ConPBRail project
Summary
In the study of the behaviour of high-speed railway bridges built with precast beams, fatigue strength is one of the most important design criteria (Sousa et al 2013). In the PCA’s laboratory, cyclic loading tests were carried out to analyse the resistance to the bending moment (Mattock and Kaar 1960), to determine the shear strength (Mattock and Kaar 1961b), to assess creep and shrinkage effects (Mattock 1961), and to analyse the global structural response of a bridge deck whose cross-section is composed my multiple precast beams, using a 1:2 scale model (Mattock and Kaar 1961a). The test setup, developed for full-scale models, consists of applying a cyclic load to the extremity of the tested structure This model comprehends two precast beam segments and their connection at the position of the support on the bridge piers. Both positive and negative bending moment effects were assessed
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