Mechanical Behavior Of Asphalt Pavement On Orthotropic Deck Of Steel Bridge

With the economic development of China, more and more long-span steel bridges had been constructed. The orthotropic steel deck with thin asphalt pavement have been used popularly to long-span bridges in order to reduce dead load and improve the span length. However, because of the flexibility of the orthotropic steel deck and the poor shear resistance at the interface between the pavement and the deck, the asphalt pavement on steel deck is often destroyed early. Moreover, orthotropic steel deck is stiffened with various transverse and longitudinal stiffeners, and it results in the complex mechanical behavior of the pavement layer on the deck. Focusing on the asphalt pavement on orthotropic steel deck, the following problems were discussed in this thesis:Properties of three types of steel deck pavement are summarized firstly, and the requirements of asphalt pavement on the steel deck were introduced and employed as fail criteria of the pavements in the analysis.The severest positions of wheel load on the deck were investigated, according to the analysis results of the principal stress distributions of the pavements, shearing stress between the pavement and the steel deck, relative displacement and curvature of steel deck. In order to find out some better simplifying methods of analysis model of steel decks, two models, the full structural model and partial structural model of the steel decks, were considered.Sensitivities of some important parameters of steel decks to the mechanical behavior of the pavements were discussed, such as the thickness of deck, arrangements of U-rib stiffeners, webs, diaphragm, and the stiffness of the pavements.