Parametric studies on cable-stayed bridges

Abstract

Parametric studies on cable-stayed bridges are performed in the paper for investigating the individual influence of different sources of nonlinearity in such bridges. The sources of nonlinearity in the cable-stayed bridge mainly include the large deflection, beam-column and cable sag effects. The influence of such kind of effects on the analysis and the structural behavior of cable-stayed bridges has been detailedly examined in the study. A finite element procedure for the nonlinear analysis of cable-stayed bridges is first set up, and then detailed parametric studies for the initial shape analysis and static deflection analysis of such bridges are carried out. The numerical results show that in the initial shape analysis the cable sag effect is most important and the other two effects are insignificant. However, in the static deflection analysis of cable-stayed bridges the large deflection effect plays the key role, the beam-column effect is also significant but minor than the large deflection effect and the cable sag effect becomes the least important one.