Free vibration analysis of straight and horizontally curved steel I-girder bridges

Abstract

In this project report a finite element formulation for free vibration analysis of straight beam and horizontally curved steel I-girder bridges has been presented. Stiffness as well as mass matrices of the curved and the straight beam elements is formulated. Each node of both of them possesses seven degrees of freedom including the warping degree of freedom. The curved beam element is derived based on the kang and Yoo’s thin walled curved beam theory in 1994. Computer programs has been presented also to carry out free vibration analysis of the various bridges. The comparison between straight beam and curved beam results has been also presented. The numerical formulation is extensively applied to investigate free vibration characteristics of the bridges considering effects of the initial curvature, boundary condition, modeling method, and degrees of freedom of cross frame. The information which help practicing engineers better understand the vibration characteristics.