Cost optimum design of reinforced concrete bridge piers for standard highway bridges

2022-2
Orak, Celil
Bridges are among the most important cost items of transportation projects in Turkey and in the world. In bridge engineering, superstructures are designed with optimization through years of experience. However, the same is not true for infrastructre elements such as piers. The evaluation of the bridge piers,built in Turkey and around the world, considering structural design shows that they are "overdesign" elements suitable for optimization. The ratio of the cost of the piers to the total bridge cost is around 10-15%. Bridge piers are generally built with reinforced concrete similar to other infrastructure. An economical design is obtained using trial and error method: the most economical design in question is a work that requires a lot of time. In this thesis, it is shown that a more economical design of standard highway bridge columns is possible quickly with the prepared bridge column optimization tool. For this tool, 14630 different reinforced concrete column sections were collected in the dataset. The loads acting on the bridge columns, displacement demands and various bridge parameters are given by the user as input to the program, and under these demands, the most economical column in the dataset is determined. Within the scope of the study, 11 actual bridges were examined and more economical columns were designed with the proposed optimization tool.

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Citation Formats
C. Orak, “Cost optimum design of reinforced concrete bridge piers for standard highway bridges,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2022.