FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF FRP WEB CORE SKEW BRIDGE DECK STRUCTURES

Abstract

Many RCC bridge decks are showing the sign of distress due to corrosion of the reinforcements much before its design life span. Use of Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) bridge deck structures is increasing rapidly all over the world due its many advantages over the conventional materials, The FRP bridge deck is lighter, durable (i.e., no corrosion) , easy to work with, maintenance free and expected to have low life cycle cost. In this dissertation work, the structural behavior of FRP web core skew bridge deck is studied. FRP bridge deck is a sandwich structure with a two way web core matrix enclosed by top and bottom face skins. This configuration dramatically reduces the weight of the deck and also reduces the chances of possible modes of failures due to the design loads. In the present study, initially, a Rayleigh-Ritz based analysis is used to describe the static load behavior of laminated rectangular plates with different ply orientations and aspect ratio. The same problem is also solved by modeling it in ABAQUS. The results obtained from the above two approaches are compared some published results and found to be satisfactory. It was concluded that the Rayleigh-Ritz method provides a simple and useful analytical tool for preliminary design of composite laminated plate having simple configurations. However, for a relatively practical configuration as in a FRP web core rectangular and skew bridge deck the extensive use of the Finite Element software package ABAQUS have been observed to be justified. As such the problems of FRP web core sandwich bridge deck subjected to uniform pressure is analyzed by developing a Finite Element Model of the FRP Web core bridge deck by using ABAQUS first and results obtained are compared with the work done by previous researchers. In all the cases the results obtained by the present FE model compared very well. As such the Finite Element Model based on ABAQUS is used to generate many new results for FRP bridge deck subjected to under Indian loading conditions (IRC). A parametric study has been carried out for FRP web core skew bridge deck subjected to IRC Class AA loading keeping in view the design requirements for its reliability and safety considering with the serviceability criteria of deflection being also satisfied. Three decks with different thicknesses are analyzed to arrive at an optimum design by calculating deflections and stresses at important locations. The present numerical study should be quite useful for further research and implementation of FRP web core bridge decks in India in near future.