Performance of steel cable-stayed bridges in ship fires, part I: Numerical method and baseline fire scenario study

Over the past decade, the previous hysteretic recognition of the fire threat to bridges has provoked significant progress in understanding the fire performance of bridges. However, despite the growing maritime shipment of combustibles, scarce studies have contributed to evaluating the safety of steel cable-stayed bridges subjected to under-girder ship fires. Limited existing knowledge is still based upon the less precise temperature curve method and flame geometry modeling. This study developed an advanced numerical method to more accurately evaluate the response of steel cable-stayed bridges subjected to ship fires. First, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach was used to reproduce realistic fire conditions. An efficient thermal boundary, adiabatic surface temperature, was then transferred to the thermal finite element model of affected girder segments for calculating the temperature propagation. Lastly, this paper used the multiscale structural finite element method to incorporate the local performance variation of exposed girders into the response of the entire bridge. The proposed method was validated by predicting a thermomechanical response of the steel beam exposed to realistic underneath fires, agreeing well with the data from two large-scale structural fire experiments by NIST. Based on the method, the response of a typical steel cable-stayed bridge subjected to ship fires was simulated. Results show that fires can introduce local damage to the girder segments above the fire and alter the internal force distribution of the entire bridge. The bending moment of the girder sections over the fire significantly increases, and the flexural characteristic of pylons is also altered. Both thermal convection and radiation contribute to the temperature increment, and the latter dominates at the locations above fires. Adopting temperature curves can overestimate or underestimate the fire impact, introducing uncertainties to the safety of steel cable-stayed bridges in ship fires and can cause unrealistic stress concentration on the border of heated and unheated domains of exposed floors. The developed advanced method is more competent in capturing the inhomogeneous temperature and stress distribution.

Automated summary

Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in understanding the fire performance of bridges. However, there is still a lack of studies on the safety evaluation of steel cable-stayed bridges subjected to ship fires. This study developed an advanced numerical method to accurately evaluate the response of steel cable-stayed bridges to ship fires. The proposed method was validated and it was found that fires can introduce local damage to the bridge and alter its internal force distribution.