Fundamental consideration on the redundancy of a steel Langer bridge based on nonlinear finite element analysis

Abstract

Since the accident of the I-35W Mississippi river bridge in 2007, a lot of research on the redundancy based on numerical analysis has been conducted. Although there is a lot of research related to truss bridges and girder bridges, there is few research about Langer bridge. Since Langer bridges are regarded as statically indeterminate structure in the design process, we can expect that Langer bridges are more redundant than statically determinate structures such as truss bridges. However there is no research on quantitative evaluation of the redundancy of Langer bridges so far. In this paper, influence of modeling of panel points and slab on evaluation of the redundancy of steel Langer bridges is investigated through a series of nonlinear finite element analyses.