Temperature effect analysis of a long-span cable-stayed bridge based on extreme strain estimation

The long-term effect of ambient temperature on bridge strain is an important and challenging problem. To investigate this issue, one year data of strain and ambient temperature of a long-span cable-stayed bridge is studied in this paper. The measured strain-time history is decomposed into two parts to obtain the strains due to vehicle load and temperature alone. A linear regression model between the temperature and the strain due to temperature is established. It is shown that for every $1^{\circ}C$ increase in temperature, the stress is increased by 0.148 MPa. Furthmore, the extreme value distributions of the strains due to vehicle load, temperature and the combination effect of them during the remaining service period are estimated by the average conditional exceedance rate approach. This approach avoids the problem of declustering of data to ensure independence. The estimated results demonstrate that the 95% quantile of the extreme strain distribution due to temperature is up to $1.488{\times}10^{-4}$ which is 2.38 times larger than that due to vehicle load. The study also indicates that the estimated extreme strain can reflect the long-term effect of temperature on bridge strain state, which has reference significance for the reliability estimation and safety assessment.