Field measurement and practical design of a lightweight composite bridge deck

Ultrahigh-performance concrete (UHPC) layers play an important role in steel-UHPC lightweight composite bridge decks. To characterize the contribution of the UHPC layer to these decks, field measurements were conducted, and the strain responses of various detail categories were measured for orthotropic steel decks with and without UHPC layers. The results show that the UHPC layer influences the stress range of the various detail categories significantly. ANSYS software was also applied to model the lightweight composite bridge deck, and a transient analysis was performed to investigate the influence of the vehicle speeds. Finally, the influence surfaces of the detail categories were introduced to determine the variation of the stress range, and a simple method was proposed to design the UHPC layer.