Investigation into Computational Method of Self-Equilibrating Thermal Stresses in Concrete Bridges

An analysis was conducted to more accurately evaluate thermal stresses in structural members of concrete bridges.Based on theory of elasticity,a new method of evaluating self-equilibrating thermal stresses in concrete bridges was proposed.With this method,the transversal stresses are solved as a plane strain problem,and consequently the longitudinal stresses are calculated with an analytic formula.Finally,an example was given to verify the validity of the method.The example shows that calculated thermal stresses using the proposed method are almost the same as ones obtained by a 3D FEM(finite element method),while the conventional method based on structural mechanics can result an error over 30%.