The structural behaviour of horizontally curved prestressed concrete box girder bridges

Bridges are important and efficient structures which are comprised of a number of elements andsubstructures, namely the deck, abutment and foundation and possibly additional intermediatesupports. Recently the horizontally curved box girder bridge has become more desirable inmodern motorway systems and big cities. Even though numerous amounts of research have beenin progress to analyse and understand the behaviour of all types of box-girder bridges, the resultsfrom these different research projects are unevaluated and dispersed. Therefore, a clear understanding of an accurate study on straight and curved box-girder bridgesis needed. In this study, a three dimensional straight and horizontally curved prestressed boxsection has been analysed with shell elements using the finite element analysis program ANSYSto examine structural behaviour and load carrying capacity. The box girder under static gravity,pre-stressed and gravity + pre-stressed loading has been analysed. The model which has beeninvestigated in this report is taken from a published paper and expanded to study the effects ofcurvature under different loads applied (UDLs). The report concludes that the FEA using shellelements is able to predict the behaviour of box girders with adequate accuracy through thecomparisons made between stress results from analytical hand calculations and published work,both for the straight and curved box girder bridges. Further theoretical and analytical investigations have been carried out to study the effects ofparameters such as horizontal curvature, prestressing, and traffic patterning. For this purpose, anew model was created, modelled with an accurate prestress representation and analysed as athree-dimensional model using the ANSYS. This thesis presents a complete description of the bridge system, addressing the aforementionedparameters and presenting the results through graphs of stress distribution, and displacement.Recommendations for the practical use of FE for bridge design are discussed.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral (Level 8)

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• AlHamaidah, ASM

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

oai:salford-repository.worktribe.com:1387521

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:salford-repository.worktribe.com:1387521