A COMPARISON OF PEDESTRAIN BRIDGE ASSESEMENT

ABSTRACT

The project demonstrated how plastic analysis was used in bridge assessment with the goal of comparing the manual plastic analysis method to a computer approach in order to evaluate the pedestrian bridge's ultimate load capacity and to anticipate its deformation under working load. It applied manual technique, which necessitates the employment of collapse mechanisms. The study used the kinematic method of plastic analysis. The incremental method of plastic analysis was employed for the computer-based approach. The bridge was modeled using the SOLIDWORKS software, and the collapse failure was assessed using the ANSYS software utilizing loaded and unloaded systems. Conforming to Euro-code EN 1991 - 2:3 Section 5 The results gotten from the computer approach showed the maximum deformation at maximum stress of 113.55MPa was 809.35mm and that minimum deformation at the minimum stress of 39.366MPa was 9.6984mm. The result at maximum stress gave the maximum strain to be 0.14737mm/mm which implied that the bridge deck remained in the elastic zone. In the manual approach the collapse load for mechanism was found to be 1346.13KN. The result obtained from both methods showed a high difference in values and units. The difference showed the uniqueness in the methods employed. The work concludes that ANSYS software assumes linear elastic behaviour for materials before they reach their yield point, which may not be accurate in real-life scenarios where materials may exhibit non-linear behaviour before yielding.