J. Construct. Steel Res. Vol. 46, Nos. 1-3, pp. 76-78, paper number 324, 1998 (©1998 Elsevier Science Lid. All rights reserved ; Printed in Great Britain PIL: $0143-974X(98)00081-9 0143.974X/98 $17.00 + 0.00 ELSEVIER Advanced Model for the Stress Analysis of Steel Truss Bridges K. Kiss and L. Dunai Department of Steel Structures, Technical University of Budapest, 1111 Budapest, Miegyetem rkp. 3, Hungary Paper Number 324 Full paper on enclosed CD-ROM A model for CAD-based strength and fatigue design of steel truss bridges is introduced in this paper. Precise and practical stress analysis can be achieved by using structural models that are best suited for the given problem. They should be complex enough to reflect the ‘secondary’ effects and stress concen- trations, yet simple enough for engineering application. High precision could be reached by creating a model of the whole steel truss bridge consisting entirely of surface elements. The computer resources demanded by this approach, however, make these kinds of models impractical. Pure 3-D beam models have relatively modest hardware requirements, while still offering more accurate stress solutions than traditional truss models. Often, this accu- racy is not adequate, especially for the analysis of the joints. The described multi-level model for stress analysis is a combination of a 3-D beam model of the bridge and plate/shell finite element sub-models of selected details. Figure 1 shows the 3-D frame of a bridge; the FEM sub- model of joint 8 can be seen in Figure 2. The global frame of the entire bridge is analysed with defined load models, supplying the node translations and rotations. The rigidity properties of the sub-models are computed by applying imposed unit deformations on their ending cross-sections. The node displace- ments of the beam model caused by the defined loading are used together with the stress distributions in the sub-models due to the imposed unit defor- mations to compute the actual stresses in the detail. The described multi-level modelling has been tested on an existing steel truss railway bridge. The test loading of this bridge had been carried out by the Department of Steel Structures at the Technical University of Budapest. ‘As part of the work presented here, an automatic algorithm was developed to compute the numerical influence lines of the stress distributions in a selected joint — based on the multi-level model — and then to use the train data for the stress history computation. The computed numerical stress histories were 76‘Advanced Model for the Stress Analysis of Steel Truss Bridges 7 Fig. 1. A 3-D beam model of a bridge. Fig. 2. The FEM sub-model of joint 8. compared with the numerical stress histories measured by strain gauges and rosettas during the test loading. The computed stress histories closely followed the measured values and tendencies. The type of modelling described in this paper provides a tool for a refined stress analysis of bridges that is able to account for the effects of geometrical stress concentrations, joint rigidity, interaction of structural elements, and78 K. Kiss and L. Dunai other effects not addressed by traditional methods. On the basis of the advanced multi-level model, more reliable fatigue and strength predictions of the bridge can be made. Two important factors justify the usefulness of this tool: the good agreement with experimental results, and the realistic hardware requirements, © /998 Elsevier Science Lid. All rights reserved KEYWORDS Truss bridge, finite element analysis, fatigue design, geometrical stress con- centration, stress influence line, stress history.