Two steel I-girder bridges were field tested with a primary objective of recording cross-frame forces under a weighed vehicle. Because previous research has suggested that skew angle is a significant variable affecting cross-frame forces and the role of cross-frames becomes more significant in skewed bridges, one bridge has a skew angle of 32 degrees while the other has a skew angle of 65 degrees. The bridges were instrumented to record cross-frame stresses in approximately 50 locations per bridge and girder stresses in 12 locations per bridge while the bridge was loaded by a weighed vehicle in various positions. The results show that cross-frame forces increase with skew and can be significantly larger than girder stresses. The field testing is also reproduced using a finite element model for the purpose of performing a parametric study to further explore cross-frame forces in steel bridges in future work and discussion of this modeling is also presented.
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