Research On Conceptual Design Of Bridges

Design is a creative process from scratch. In general, we should first have an idea and then put it into practice. For the bridge design, situation is the same. Designers should have a general idea of the bridge first, and then gose the design of specific structure and detail design. Based on the summarizing of the process of engineering design, the thesis refines the definition of conceptual design of bridges.Conceptual design of bridges is the precursor of detailed design. The overall grasp of the bridge idea is the essence of the conceptual design of bridges. The feasibility is based on the accumulation of experiences, qualitative analysis and reasonable estimation. Using the experiences of the developed program in industrial design, the thesis puts forward creatively a new idea of the conceptual design of bridges, which could run through the whole process of bridge design. This new idea is called as product-based conceptual design of bridges.Starting from the conventional process of bridge design, the parts of general planning included in the three main design phases of bridges, which are engineering feasibility study, preliminary design and construction documents design, is extracted. Then narrowly-defined bridge conceptual design, which is technique-oriented, is generalized.The key of the conceptual design of bridges is innovating. As the concentrated expression of innovation, selection of bridge types, which is affected by technique, economy and aesthetics, is naturally pushed up to a prominent position, and becomes the core of the conceptual design of bridges. Based on the basic idea of conceptual design of bridges, the thesis highlights the bridge type selection and bridge sculpt, emphasizes the bridge aesthetics which has been neglected by conventional design for a long time.The front design conception of bridge projects such as durability design, ecological design, life cycle design, topology optimization and etc., which enrich and improve the contents of the conceptual design of bridges, is also discussed.Because the significance of the conceptual design of bridges hasn't been attached adequate attentions, the research developed in this field is rather limited. About the expression means of the conceptual design of bridges, some visualization methods such as sketch drawing, virtual models creating and physical models making are given. Finally, some bridge scheme and examples are analysed by the idea of bridge conceptual design.