Impact Analysis of Tower Number on Automotive Live Load Effect in Suspension Bridge

Abstract

As a bridge with a large span, suspension bridge has obvious advantage in the current cross-sea engineering. In order to achieve longer span capacity, long-span multi-tower suspension bridge programs were repeatedly proposed. Due to the increase in the number of tower, the mechanical behavior would be inevitably different with the ordinary two-tower suspension bridge. For better grasp the difference of the mechanical properties, Midas civil 2011 is used to model to analyze. Suspension bridge models whose spans are 1080m with different towers (two, three, four, five, six,) are established to analyze the change in the mechanical properties under the action of vehicle load. The results show that the mechanical properties of multi-tower suspension bridge are quietly different from two-tower suspension bridge and with the increase in the number of bridge tower, the displacements of main girder and main tower have large difference. When the number of tower is more than or equal to four, multi-tower suspension bridges have little difference in the mechanical properties and that means multi-tower effect is not obvious.