For a housing project in Sirdal, Norway, a bridge is required in order to reach the construction site. Royal HaskoningDHV is interested in the possibilities that FRP composites might offer in terms of bridge design for this situation. Added to this, the fact that construction is
...
For a housing project in Sirdal, Norway, a bridge is required in order to reach the construction site. Royal HaskoningDHV is interested in the possibilities that FRP composites might offer in terms of bridge design for this situation. Added to this, the fact that construction is mainly possible from one side of the river lead to the idea of an FRP cable-stayed bridge (the deck is made from FRP composite, however the cables and the pylon are respectively madefrom steel and concrete). The main span is 64 meters, which is large for an FRP bridge.Combined with its lightweight, low stiffness and structural damping, the structural response to wind excitation might be an issue. Next to designing an FRP cable-stayed bridge, this thesis therefore focuses in a second part on the dynamic behaviour to wind excitation of the bridge. To have a point of comparison with a more ’traditional’ cable-stayed bridge, in parallelto the FRP bridge, a steel-concrete alternative has been designed and analyzed. To push the comparison further, long span alternatives of the two bridges have been designed and analyzed to see their response to dynamic wind excitation. The dynamic analyses in this thesis only take buffeting (turbulence-induced vibrations) into account. Flutter (motion-induced vibrations) are considered through simple approximations from Eurocode.