Overview
Motives for better Engineering
Explore horizontal earth pressure,
Coulomb's theory, and its applications.
Compare geotechnical results and
understand the trial wedge method's nuances.
Explore the technical content on vessel collision
to calculate the annual frequency of bridge component collapse.
Introducing the concept of seismic isolation design.
See more
It is easy to obtain the result from bridge finite element analysis, but to get more accurate results requires extra effort. Even the most robust finite element analysis solvers adopt the method that approximates the structural behavior, by minimizing the associated error function compared with the complex function that represents the realistic structural behavior.
The previous article (Curvature effects on a medium-span curved bridge) showed that we should be cautious to get reasonable torsional moments through simple beam analysis. One of the easiest ways to refine the results is to add more nodes at the inner support locations, however, we still have a question about “how many?”. Now we are reviewing the effect of curvature for bending moments.
We are trying to find bending moments for three spans continuous curved girder, 150
ft + 223 ft + 150 ft = 523 ft, the radius is 1182’-6” as shown.