Abstract: During the cantilever construction of a bridge, the closure section concrete often cracks due to thermal stress. In order to analyze the temperature field of the closure section concrete caused by hydration heat during the construction using FEM, a calculation method of zone-partitioning and time-varying temperature increase rate is proposed. In this method, the closure section is divided into n areas according to the pouring sequence of concrete. Then, time-varying temperature increase rate of each zone is loaded according to the measured results of adiabatic temperature increase test and its pouring time. In order to verify the rationality of the algorithm, in-situ measurement of the temperature field on the concrete of D closure segment construction of Hongguang Road Fenghe Bridge was carried out. The measured and calculated results show that the peak error and peak lag time of the proposed method is smaller than the non-zone-partitioning method. The temperature peak errors by the method of zone-partitioning and time-varying temperature increase rate are less than 5%.