Numerical Simulation of the Long-Term Behaviour of Long Span Prestressed Concrete Bridges

The design of structures is more and more directed towards the entire lifetime design with multiple concurrent objectives. Apart from durability, the most important factor in the whole life design of reinforced and, in particular, prestressed concrete bridges, is the Service Limit State. From this point of view, prestressed concrete bridges are very sensitive to long-term increase of deflections. A survey of many bridges monitored in various countries showed that all of them have experienced similar deflection histories. The intention of the paper is to describe methods and mathematical models which should be used for reliable prediction of long-term behaviour of prestressed concrete bridges. The comparisons between results of numerical simulations and measurement data will be also mentioned.