Free Vibration Analysis of RC Box-Girder Bridges Using FEM

The free vibration analysis of simply supported box-girder bridges is carried out using the finite element method. The fundamental frequency is determined in straight, skew, curved and skew-curved box-girder bridges. It is important to analyse the combined effect of skewness and curvature because skew-curved box-girder bridge behaviour cannot be predicted by simply adding the individual effects of skewness and curvature. At first, an existing model is considered to validate the present approach. A convergence study is carried out to decide the mesh size in the finite element method. An exhaustive parametric study is conducted to determine the fundamental frequency of box-girder bridges with varying skew angle, curve angle, span, span-depth ratio and cell number. The skew angle is varied from 0 degrees to 60 degrees, curve angle is varied from 0 degrees to 60 degrees, span is changed from 25 to 50 m, span-depth ratio is varied from 10 to 16, and single cell & double cell are used in the present study. A total of 420 bridge models are used for parametric study in the investigation. Mode shapes of the skew-curved bridge are also presented. The fundamental frequency of the skew-curved box-girder bridge is found to be more than the straight bridge, so, the skew-curved box-girder bridge is preferable. The present study may be useful in the design of box-girder bridges.