Torsional behavior of a hybrid FRP-aluminum space truss bridge: Experimental and numerical study

A novel lightweight hybrid fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) aluminum space truss structure that consists of two triangular deck-truss beams has been designed for rapid emergency bridging system. This paper reports a large-scale pure torsion test on a cantilever full-scale specimen to evaluate the detailed linear-elastic torsional behavior and the load-carrying mechanism of the hybrid twin-trackway spatial structure. Additionally, a structural computational finite element model (FEM) was constructed and validated against the experiments. To fully understand the load-carrying mechanism obtained from the experiments, numerical analyses were performed by equivalently converting the torsion reaction of the hybrid twin-trackway structure to the bending and torsion of its twin triangular deck-truss beams. The results indicate that the experimental structure exhibits a good and specific torsional response, which can be well described by FEM. The unidirectional pultruded FRP profiles are mainly subjected to axial forces and are thus appropriate for application to this unique twin-trackway space truss, unlike in the case of the alone single-trackway triangular beam under torsion. The vertical bending of the twin triangular deck-truss beams play a key role in the behavior of load-carrying of the entire bridge, unlike in the case of the conventional torsional calculation method for the separated box beam. In the initial design, the torsional calculation of such a novel bridge can be carried out using the flexural analytical and numerical models of the triangular deck-truss beam.