Title: Analysis of thermal deformations for a long-span arch bridge using long-term monitoring data

Authors: Guang-Dong Zhou; Bin Chen; Jun-Hong Xu

Addresses: College of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China ' Department of Civil Engineering, Zhejiang University City College, Hangzhou 310015, China ' College of Civil Engineering, Nanjing Forestry University, No. 159 Lonpan Road, Nanjing, 210037, Jiangsu, China

Abstract: Deformation is an important parameter indicating bridge integrity and serviceability. Fully understanding deformation induced by temperature variations plays an indispensable role in developing deformation-based indexes for bridge performance assessment as well as predicting the displacement amplitude under normal operation environment. In this paper, long-term monitoring data are used to facilitate investigating the thermal deformation properties for a long-span arch bridge. The time-varying features of thermal deformation in longitudinal, vertical, and transversal directions are first discussed. Then, the relationship among thermal deformation in the three directions is extracted. Following that, the thermal correlation of deformation is explored. The results show that the longitudinal and vertical deformation depends heavily on seasons and the thermal deformation in the three directions has close relationships. The vertical displacement has nonlinear correlation with the temperature. The results are expected to provide reference values for similar types of arch bridges.

Keywords: structural health monitoring; SHM; long-span arch bridge; thermal deformation; temperature monitoring; time-varying features.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLCPE.2020.115388

International Journal of Lifecycle Performance Engineering, 2020 Vol.4 No.4, pp.278 - 295

Received: 10 Sep 2019
Accepted: 24 Mar 2020

Published online: 01 Jun 2021 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article