Shear lag effects on wide U-section pre-stressed concrete light rail bridges

Recently, U-section decks have been more and more used in metro and light rail bridges as an innovative concept in bridge deck design and a successful alternative to conventional box girders because of their potential advantages. U-section may be viewed as a single vent box girder eliminating the top slab connecting the webs, with the moving vehicles travelling on the lower deck. U-section bridges thus solve many problems like limited vertical clearance underneath the bridge lowest point, besides providing built-in noise barriers. Beam theory in mechanics assumes that plane section remains plane after bending, but it was found that shearing forces produce shear deformations and the plane section does not remain plane. This phenomenon leads to distortion of the cross section. For a box or a U section, this distortion makes the central part of the slab lagging behind those parts closer to the webs and this is known as shear lag effect. A sample real-world double-track U-section metro bridge is modelled in this paper using a commercial finite element analysis program and is analysed under various loading conditions and for different geometric variations. The three-dimensional finite element analysis is used to demonstrate variations in the transverse bending moments in the deck as well as variations in the longitudinal normal stresses induced in the cross section along the U-girder's span thus capturing warping and shear lag effects which are then compared to the stresses calculated using conventional beam theory. This comparison is performed not only to locate the distortion, warping and shear lag effects typically induced in U-section bridges but also to assess the main parameters influencing them the most.