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Traditionally, chilled water and ice have been employed to reduce the temperature of concrete mix in hot weather condition. Chilled water has a limitation in its cooling potential. For instance, even if all mixing water has been converted into chilled water, the temperature reduction achieved in concrete mix is only about 2.7oC.
In balanced cantilever method, the moment is balanced along the length of the piers. However, along the extended cantilevers only a part of negative bending moment is balanced by prestressing bending moment arising from normal force induced by prestressing.
Balanced cantilever construction simply cantilevers segments from a pier in a balanced manner on each side until the mid-span is reached and a closure is made with a previous half span cantilever from the preceding
pier.
For single-span coupled cable, the length of cable is one span and they are coupled at the construction joint which is located at 0.25 of span. The use of single-span coupled cable in span-by-span construction suffers the following drawbacks:
(i) Stressing all tendons in one span is time consuming. Moreover, the construction team has to wait until the concrete has gained enough strength before all tendons in the span to be stressed.
The null point is the position of zero movement in the bridge deck. When the bridge deck is pinned at a single pier, it provides the location of null point with no deck movement. However, when the bridge deck is pinned to more piers, the position of null point has to be calculated. The determination of null point is important because it serves to estimate the forces on the piers by deck length changes and to calculate the sliding movement of sliding and free bearings.
Live loads on one span tend to cause uplift of outer column of the split piers (twin leaf piers). When the two split piers are designed too close, the uplift may be greater than the dead load reaction of the outer pier so that tension is induced in the outer pier.
When the piers are built directly into deck without bearings, the monolithic construction creates a portal structure which modifies the bending moment envelope in the deck when compared with bridges with bearings. For instance, hogging moments are increased in supports with the decrease in sagging moments in mid-span of bridge deck. On the other hand, the shear stiffness of piers is a major concern because it tends to resist length changes of bridge deck which could not expand and contract readily.
Bridges constructed by incremental launching method are usually low in span depth ratio and typical values are 14 to17. With low span depth ratio, the bridge segments are stiff in bending and torsion which is essential to cater for the launching process.
The cross sectional area of duct is normally 2.5 times that of the area of prestressing steel. The size of ducts should be not designed to be too small because of the followings:
At several locations in the span (i.e. third or quarter points) the tendons are deviated to the correct tendon profile by concrete deviators in external prestressing. The advantages of external prestressing are listed below:
(i) Owing the absence of bond between the tendon and structure, external prestressing allows the removal and replacement of one or two tendon at one time so that the bridge could be retrofitted in the event of deterioration and their capacity could be increased easily. This is essential for bridges in urban areas where traffic disruption is undesirable.
