FULL-SCALE
EXPERIMENTAL AND ANALYTICAL STUDIES OF A HORIZONTALLY CURVED STEEL I-GIRDER
BRIDGE DURING CONSTRUCTION
by
Assistant Professor
Department of Civil &
Environmental Engineering
Pennsylvania State
University
This work examines the behavior of a horizontally curved steel bridge system through component and system tests. The first known sets of laboratory data related to full-scale curved steel bridge behavior were produced.
The component tests looked at behavior of individual bridge cross frame members under various combinations of end moments and compressive and tensile axial loads. They established member elastic limits and helped optimize instrumentation on cross frames within the full-scale experimental curved bridge. In addition, they were used to examine existing formulations related to the behavior of tubular steel beam-columns.
The system tests studied six variations of the final experimental structure, a simply-supported plate girder system, during construction with differing combinations of intermediate shoring support. Extensive examination of the data occurred so that confidence in instrumentation and data reduction schemes could be established. Monte Carlo simulations were completed to examine the effects of instrument variability on behavior. Comparisons between experimental results and those from computational and approximate analysis methods were made.