EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON PRESTRESSED-HIGH-STRENGTH-LIGHT-WEIGHT -CONCRETE CONTINUOUS RIGID FRAME BRIDGE

High-strength-light-weight concrete (HSLWC) (with a cube strength higher than CL40) has a bright future in the application of large-span bridges due to its obvious advantages. It reduces the self-weight of the bridge, so that the internal stress can be smaller, the span can be larger and the number of piers can be reduced. An experimental research on a 3-span prestressed continuous rigid frame model bridge with a superstructure made of CL50 HSLWC is presented in this paper. The prototype of the bridge model is located in the 14th section of the highway connecting Anning and Chuxiong in Yunnan province. The model bridge was designed by the scale of 1/4 and was tested under 10 different load cases. The test results showed that the prestressed HSLWC continuous rigid frame model bridge had good mechanical performance. Under a traffic load which was 1.0 to 1.5 times of its design load, all indices of the bridge model satisfied the requirement of design standard. And under 2 times of design load, parts of indices were beyond the standard requirement but the bridge still showed good ductility. And under very large overload situation, the bridge was damaged seriously but it still could maintain the load capacity and did not collapse.