Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Conventional bridge materials have certain environmental factors limiting their service life. These factors include termite or fungi attack on timber, chemical attacks on concrete and corrosion for steel. These facts point to the necessity of development of new construction materials and related technologies for use in bridges exposed to aggressive environmental conditions. Fibre-reinforced plastics have long been used in weight-sensitive applications such as aerospace, marine, biomedical and sports industries due to their high specific stiffness and strength. Its superior structural performance depends primarily upon its anisotropic and heterogeneous characteristics and can be optimized to the requirement of the user. However, its infrastructural application is somewhat recent. Since fibre-reinforced plastic can be moulded to various shapes, is corrosion resistant, has lower lifecycle cost and durability, it can be used in constructing bridges or its parts. However, the fibre-reinforced plastic bridge industry lacks simplified and practical design guidelines and specifications. A box girder bridge has been taken from available literature as an example and parametric studies have been carried out using general purpose finite element software ABAQUS to investigate the critical factors affecting the dynamic responses of such a fibre-reinforced plastic bridge.

Keywords

Fibre-reinforced plastics chopped strand mat laminate dynamic analysis natural frequency bridge engineering

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Davalos

Salim

Qiao

. Analysis and design of pultruded FRP shapes under bending. Compos Part B: Eng 1995; 27(B): 295–305.

Davalos

Salim

Qiao

. Multiobjective material architecture optimization of pultruded FRP I-beams. Compos Struct 1997; 35(9): 271–281.

Davalos

Salim

Qiao

. Flexural-torsional buckling of pultruded fibre reinforced plastic composite I-beams: experimental and analytical evaluations. Compos Struct 1997; 38(1): 241–250.

Davalos

Salim

Qiao

. Analysis and design of fibre reinforced plastic composite deck and stringer bridges. Compos Struc 1997; 38(1–4): 295–307.

Gan

Lin

. Design and evaluation of various section profiles for pultruded deck panels. Compos Struct 1999; 47(1–4): 719–725.

Luke S. The design, installation, and monitoring of FRP bridge at West Mill Oxford, in lightweight bridge decks. In: European bridge engineering conference, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 27–28 March 2002.

Shekar V, Petro SH and Ganga Rao. Fiber reinforced polymer composite bridges in West Virginia. In: 8th International Conference on Low Volume Roads, Reno, Nevada, 22–25 June 2003.

Kim HY and Kim SM. Design of pultruded GFRP deck for highway bridges. In: Proceedings of the 2003 ECI conference on advanced materials for construction of bridges, buildings and other structures III, Davos, Switzerland, 7–12 September 2003.

Upadyay

Kalyanaraman

. Simplified analysis of FRP box-girders. Compos Struct 2003; 59(2): 217–225.

10.

Kumar

Chandrashekhara

Nanni

. Structural performance of a FRP bridge deck. Construct Building Mater 2004; 18(1): 35–47.

11.

Ki-Tae

Sang-Mo

Kim

. Reliability analysis on GFRP deck for design criteria suggestion. Korean Society of Civil Engineers. J Civil Eng 2004; 8(3): 301–305.

12.

Roy RJ, Debaiky AS, Borazghi H, et al. Glass fibre reinforced polypropylene bridge deck panel design, fabrication and load testing. In: 33rd annual general conference of the Canadian society for civil engineering, Ontario, Canada, 2–4 June 2005, GC:160: pp. 1–9.

13.

Hollaway

. A review of the present and future utilisation of FRP composites in the civil infrastructure with reference to their important in-service properties. Construct Building Mater 2010; 24(12): 2419–2445.

14.

Almansour H and Cheung MS. Structural performance of laminated FRP box girder bridge deck compared to slab on prestressed concrete girder bridge. In: The 8^th Canada Japan joint workshop on composites, Montreal, Canada, 26–29 July 2010, pp. 1–32.

15.

Wael

. Local buckling analysis of pultruded FRP structural shapes subjected to eccentric compression. Thin Walled Struct 2010; 48(9): 709–717.

16.

Nicolas

Lombardi

. Glass fibre reinforced polymer/steel hybrid honey comb sandwich concept for bridge deck applications. Compos Struct 2011; 93(4): 1275–1282.

17.

Amir

Kim

. Numerical analysis of pultruded GFRP box girders supporting adhesively bonded concrete deck in flexure. Eng Struct 2011; 33(12): 3527–3536.

18.

Ascione

Giordano

Spadea

. Lateral buckling of pultruded FRP beams. Compos Part B 2011; 42(4): 819–824.

19.

Osman

William

Sreenivas

. Dynamic analysis of Bently Creek Bridge with FRP deck. ASCE J Bridge Eng 2012; 17(2): 318–333.

20.

ABAQUS FEA v9.1, DS Simulia, Dassault Systems, 2004–2012.

Critical factors influencing the dynamic characteristics of fibre-reinforced plastic bridges — a parametric study

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References