Mechanical Properties Research Of A New Orthotropic Steel Bridge Deck

This paper proposed a new kind of orthotropic steel deck which includes upper deck, corrugated steel deck and lower deck. This new orthotropic steel deck mainly based on the present two main distresses which are the premature damage and the steel welding fatigue damage. For the corrugated steel deck, its corrugation direction of corrugated steel deck is along with bridge horizontal direction. All those three parts are connected with high strength screw bolt. This new orthotropic deck use high strength screw bolt to connect three parts to solve the problem of welding fatigue crack. The screw bolt is higher than the upper deck with about 3 to 4cm. This can be used as shear connector to connect the cement-based composite pavement which is added before the asphalt pavement.This paper use finite element software to analyze the static mechanic properties of this new orthotropic steel deck. Firstly, the overall mechanical properties are compared between the new kind deck and traditional deck. The results show that both the absolute value and the relative value of deflection and stress of new deck is better than traditional deck. Then, the local mechanical properties of both kinds of deck are compared. For this part, a new type of pavement system are proposed, which shows that the local deflection and stress of the asphalt pavement of new deck is much better than traditional deck. Lastly, the geometrical parameters of this new deck are optimized. After optimization, the upper and lower deck of the new orthotropic steel deck is 14mm and 4mm; the thickness, height, corrugated angle and corrugated space of corrugated steel deck is 6mm,280mm,90°and 600mm. The thickness and height of horizontal rib is 12mm and 1400mm. The optimized orthotropic only add 1.6% more steel usage than the traditional one, but improve the mechanic properties greatly.The research shows that this kind of orthotropic steel deck which is based on corrugated steel deck can effectively change the deflection and stress of pavement layer. However the self-weight of this new deck is similar with the traditional one, which can effectively length the life span of bridge pavement. Therefore, it is suggested that this new orthotropic steel deck is popularized after further research.