A Simplified Analysis Method For Fiber Reinforced Plastic Rib Core Sandwich Skew Plates

In the past one decade, substantial progress has been made in the use of fiber rein- forced plastic in specialized sectors of civil engineering, in particular, bridges have re- ceived a great deal of attention. Several bridge deck systems made of only composite materials have been reported in the literature. Due to the high-performance, low- weight and cost-effective properties, rib core sandwich construction is one of the most common used deck systems in the demonstration projects which have been constructed to obtain engineering experiences. This paper study a simplified analysis method for bending behavior of rib core sandwich deck. The word implified?contains two significants. The first sense is that the sand- wich structure was smeared to an equivalent orthotropic plate. The other sense is that the bending behavior was studied based on pproximate?method. Based on classical laminate theory, the bridge system is idealized as a homogeneous orthotropic skew plate which has the same global stiffness characteristics of the bridge system. Ritz method was extended to the skew laminated plates cases and used to analysis the transformed skew orthotropic plates. Three laminated skew plate examples are solved and the solutions are compared with finite element results to demonstrate the validity of the simplified method. The practical demonstration bridge system project is investigated to show the application of the approach. The agreement of numerical results between this simplified method and finite element analysis is excellent, specially for rectangular deck cases. This sim- plified approach allows an engineer to explore a wide range of different solutions to a given problem at the initial stages of a design, without having to resort to expensive finite element analysis. Finite element analysis can be reserved for checking the final design to ensure that it meets the strength requirements of the material. To detect damage mechanism of the sandwich deck, based on finite element analy- sis and field dynamic tests, an efficient damage detection method is also studied in this thesis.