ABSTRACT

Within the progressive expansion of urban traffic and highway, horizontally prestressed curved box girder bridges have become reliable and sustainable solutions for nowadays highway system and urban interchanges. Due to complex geometrical properties of curved girders, the prestressed concrete curved box girders are more complicated than straight bridges. Hence, more researches have been conducted for the purpose of determining a clear and good understanding of mechanical properties and behaviors of the curved bridges. The current study has also based on the engineering backgrounds of designed prestressed concrete curved box girders in order to investigate mechanical properties by modifying structural parameters when curved bridges are only subjected to static loads. Based on the performance of finite element analysis, the static analysis of different bridges with variable parameters has been carried out in order to compare mechanical properties of prestressed concrete curved box girders. Results have shown that displacements and stresses of aforementioned curved box girders under dead loads and prestressed loads are exponentially deformed as the curved radius is changed but they are linearly deformed as the height of box girder is modified.