PROGRESSIVE COLLAPSES SIMULATION AND IMPORTANCE ASSESSMENT OF STONE ARCH BRIDGE

摘要

With the increasing accidents of structures caused by human errors,terrorist attacks or nature disasters in recent years,disaster-prevention and hazardmitigation for structures have aroused the concern of engineers,especially the safety of infrastructures. Based on a traditional 3-span stone arch bridge,this paper establishes a 3-D finite element (FE) model of the stone arch bridge with the general-purpose finite element program-MSC.MARC. The process of the collapse is simulated with the contact algorithm and the deactivation of elements,and the possible reasons of the collapse are analyzed. Furthermore,the importance of different components of the stone arch bridge is indexed with the conception of the generalized structural stiffness,so as to identify the most critical regions of the stone arch bridge. The predicted critical regions are verified to be correct and reasonable via limit analysis,which provides references for the design,construction and maintenance of arch bridges.