Reliability of construction control of cable-stayed bridges

Abstract

Deck elevations and cable tensions change throughout the construction process of a long-span cable-stayed bridge. Accordingly, geometric errors of deck elevations and tension errors in cables are frequently encountered. The tolerance values of such errors are of great concern to the construction control of cable-stayed bridges. In order to obtain reasonable tolerance errors of deck elevations and cable tensions, the randomness of geometric parameters, the material parameters and the loading parameters of the bridge during erection should be considered. This paper presents a novel reliability-based approach to determine the tolerance errors for different construction stages of a cable-stayed bridge. In the proposed approach, an improved response surface method based on finite-element analysis of segmental construction of the bridge girder is used to yield the failure probabilities of construction control under different erection errors. Reasonable tolerance errors are then obtained based on the acceptable failure probabilities. For engineering applications, the proposed method is further applied to the reliability analysis of the construction contort of the newly built Huangpu Bridge across the Pearl River in Guangzhou. The new approach is also applicable to the construction control of other types of bridges.