Live Load Distribution for Reactions at Piers of Continuous Prestressed Concrete Skewed Bridges

This paper presents a study of skewness effect on live load reactions at piers of continuous prestressed concrete bridges. Two prestressed concrete bridges were selected for the study, one bridge with two-span and the other with four-span. To study the effect of skewness, the skew angles of the bridges were varied from 0 o to 60 o . Finite element modeling and analysis were performed on the selected bridges. The comparison for live load reaction and shear revealed that the distribution factor of reaction at piers was higher than that of shear at beam ends near the same support location. The increase in reaction distribution factor was more significant than that in shear distribution factor on the interior beam line when skew angle was greater than 30 o . It is recommended that more research be performed for the distribution factor of live load reaction to quantify the responses.