Partial Elastic Scheme Method in Cantilever Construction of Concrete Arch Bridges

In this paper, a study about stay stressing procedures of concrete arch bridges built by cantilevering with temporary stays is presented. Particularly, the partial elastic scheme method is proposed to find the initial cable forces, and a forward procedure is implemented to follow the actual sequence of construction by extending a procedure already applied to concrete cable-stayed bridges. The theoretical treatment is followed by a numerical application on a case study of a concrete arch bridge, and a comparison between initial cable forces found by the partial elastic scheme method and classical backward analysis is presented here. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure to achieve the requested design geometry of the arch and for limiting the variation of bending moments and stay forces in construction stages.