Estimation of Inelastic Buckling Collapse Loads for Steel Cable-Stayed Bridges

Abstract

In this paper, a simple method for estimating the buckling collapse loads for steel cable-stayed bridges is proposed. An improved convergence criterion for iterative eigenvalue computations is suggested to consider the beam-column effect for girder and tower members of a cable-stayed bridge system. Then, the two example bridges representing medium and long-span models are analyzed in order to show the validity and applicability of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method for a beam-column is a good substitute for complex nonlinear inelastic analysis to approximately determine the buckling collapse loads of the bridge systems for all spans and girder depth ranges in preliminary design stages.