Optimum design of composite prestressed concrete girder railway bridges

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Al-Nuaimi, A., Mohammad, F. ORCID: 0000-0001-6955-4261 and Mohammed, S., 2012. Optimum design of composite prestressed concrete girder railway bridges. In: EngOpt 2012 – 3rd International Conference on Engineering Optimization, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1-5 July 2012.

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Abstract

This paper deals with the formulation of design optimisation of pretsressed concrete bridges. The bridge is of a slab-on-girder type, hence modeled as an equivalent orthotropic plate. The whole bridge system is considered as a simply supported right angle plate. Following linear elastic behaviour, the governing fourth order differential equation of the plate for patch load is solved in order to find out load distribution on the girders forming the bridge as well as the deflections and internal forces at critical sections of the whole bridge. The optimisation problem is formulated for various cross sectional geometries including rectangular, symmetrical I, unsymmetrical I, box, T and inverted T sections. The design variables are the main cross sectional dimensions, prestressing force and tendon eccentricity. The objective function comprises the cost of concrete material, formwork and prestressing steel tendons. The constraint functions are set to satisfy design requirements as per British Standards for bridges (BS 5400). Nonlinear optimisation method based on sequential unconstrained minimisation technique (SUMT) is employed to achieve optimum bridge configuration for specific design parameters of span length, concrete compressive strength and railway loading patterns. A purpose built computer program is set up to carry out the solution of the design optimisation problem efficiently in terms of time and effort. A typical example of unsymmetrical I-section having a small bottom flange as compared to the top flange width with composite deck effect is presented. The results show that the total cost increases as the span increases due to the increase of the initial prestressing force. Furthermore, the total cost decreases as the concrete compressive strength increases in spite of the increasing of the prestressing force. This is due to decrease of the overall depth, top and bottom flange widths, hence leading to a smaller girder size. Such finding will encourage engineers to adopt high strength concrete for bridges as it will help reducing not only the initial cost but also the life cycle cost of the bridge over its entire life.

Item Type:	Conference contribution
Creators:	Al-Nuaimi, A., Mohammad, F. and Mohammed, S.
Date:	2012
Divisions:	Schools > School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	26 Feb 2016 14:59
Last Modified:	09 Jun 2017 13:59
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27061