Stability analysis of steel cable-stayed bridges

The objective of this study is to investigate the stability behavior of steel cable-stayed bridges by comparing the buckling loads obtained by means of finite element methods with eigen-solver. In recent days, cable-stayed bridges dramatically attract engineers' attention due to their structural characteristics and aesthetics. They require a number of design parameters and present a high degree of static indetermination, especially for long span bridges. Cable-stayed bridges exhibit several nonlinear behaviors concurrently under normal design loads due to the individual nonlinearity of substructures such as the pylons, stay cables, and bridge deck, and their interactions. The geometric nonlinearities arise mainly from large displacements of cables. Strong axial and lateral forces acting on the bridge deck and pylons cause structural nonlinear behaviors. The interaction is among the substructures. In this paper, a typical three-span steel cable-stayed bridge with a variety of design parameters has been investigated. The numerical results indicate that the design parameters such as the ratio of $L_1/L$ and $I_p/I_b$ are important for the structural behavior, where $L_1$ is the main span length, L is the total span length of the bridge, $I_p$ is the moment of inertia of the pylon, and $I_b$ is the moment of inertia of the bridge deck. When the ratio $I_p/I_b$ increases, the critical load decreases due to the lack of interaction among substructures. Cable arrangements and the height of pylon are another important factors for this type of bridge in buckling analysis. According to numerical results, the bridges supported by a pylon with harp-type cable arrangement have higher critical loads than the bridges supported by a pylon with fan-type cable arrangement. On contrary, the shape of the pylon does not significantly affect the critical load of this type of bridge. All numerical results have been non-dimensionalized and presented in both tabular and graphical forms.