Long-Term Deflection Control in Cantilever Prestressed Concrete Bridges. II: Experimental Verification

Abstract

This paper continues the preceding study on the long-term deflection control of prestressed concrete bridges. In this paper, an experimental study is first presented. The objectives of the experimental program are to check the accuracy of the constitutive modeling for time-dependent analysis of prestressed concrete bridge need in this study and to verify the concept of the proposed deflection control method. Experimental results indicate that the constitutive model and numerical analysis can be used to predict the long-term behavior of prestressed concrete structures, and the realistic feasibility of the deflection control method is verified. A numerical simulation is then carried out on the prediction of a segmentally constructed cantilever prestressed concrete bridge. Numerical results show that the proposed deflection control method is practically feasible to control the long-term deflection of the bridge and to increase the span of a prestressed concrete bridge.