Buckling behaviors and load resistance design of steel cable-arches under in-plane loads

This paper presents theoretical and numerical investigations into the in-plane elastic global buckling performance and load resistance design of a kind of pin-ended cable-arch (CA). CA is assumed to take radial uniformly distributed load (RUDL), full-span and half-span vertical uniformly distributed loads (FSVUDL and HSVUDL) respectively. From the preliminary theoretical derivation based on the Rayleigh-Ritz Method, a new key parameter of CA defined as the restraining factor of the cables on the arch, was established and it reflects the restraining effect of the cables on the elastic buckling behavior of CA under RUDL. In addition, the elastic buckling loads obtained from the Finite Element (FE) numerical results is used to determine the normalized slenderness ratio which can be further modified to consider the slackness of the cables in the nonlinear analysis. Based on the results obtained from nonlinear inelastic FE analysis of CA under axial compression and the combination of axial compression and bending effect, the in-plane design for predicting load resistance of CA is proposed and it provides a lower envelop in estimating the in-plane global stability capacity of CA. In addition, it is observed that the pre-tensioning stress amplitude of the cables has insignificant effect on the global stability capacity of CA under VUDL. However, in practical engineering application, the two cables only connected to the arch-pins are recommended to establish the target pre-tensioned stress values ranging from 200 MPa to 400 MPa.