ABSTRACT
This paper will discuss the temperature problems for civil engineering structures and in particular the model treated will consider a segment of a steel box girder of a bridge located in Brussels, Belgium. The principal sections of the papers are:
Current regulations
Develop an approximation of the solar fluxes location based
Create a finite element model and estimate the temperature effects.
The bridge section considered has dimension of 8 m wide and 5 m high, two flanges of 5 m are located on the top and a layer of 15 mm thickness of asphalt cover the bridge.
Parameters such as shades, diffuse radiation, mutual radiation between the inside and the outside of the structure are taken into account hence the finite element model is very accurate.
A quite sophisticated analytical method has been developed to compute the effective solar flux for any specific location during a 1 year period, the extra-terrestrial radiation measured on the considered surface of the box girder normal to the radiation has been calculated for Brussels along the entire year.
The thermal values of the sun radiations retrieved are applied to a finite element model, a thermal calculation of the hottest day of the year and a thermal calculation of the entire year are computed, and the thermal results are used for a mechanical calculation as boundary condition.
The temperature recorded for both calculation are quite realistic, the values are reported for the most important nodes of the structure and we can conclude that for the temperature some values reach high temperatures and high stresses, this would cause problems on the structure, this temperature loads added to the regular loads of the bridge can be quite significant and can cause damages to certain parts of the bridge and in particular in between the connected parts where the cohesion can slack off. Further research based in different location with more temperature range variations would be very interesting. Distribution of the temperatures in some nodes of the structure. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315207681/cd556cd4-4dcf-4efe-8e29-56fc67b8bfbd/content/fig325_1.tif"/>
