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Early tied-arch bridges cannot satisfy the current traffic load demand due to their load grades and maintenance levels. Also, these tied-arch bridges have accumulated structural damage with increasingly prominent safety risks. In order to accurately evaluate the characteristics of tied-arch bridges' structural-influenced lines and identify damage of their arch ribs and suspenders, two analytical solutions are derived and established in this paper for the thrust-influenced lines of parabola and catenary two-hinged arches with a tie beam. A new method and an index for identifying damage of arch ribs and suspenders of tied-arch bridges are proposed. The results of numerical simulation in this paper verified that the proposed analytical solution has good analytical accuracy in practice on those two-hinged nonflat arches. With the use of equivalent thrust-influenced line difference curvature, the effectiveness of damage identification and the verification method were verified on the tie beam, suspender, and arch rib of plane tie arch structure as well as the suspender and arch rib of tied-arch bridges in this research. Furthermore, combining with grey relation analysis, the noise immunity of the proposed index method can be verified. Also, thrust-influenced line recognition based on VMD (variational mode decomposition) is introduced, and a practical process of bridge health assessment based on the quasistatic-influenced line loading of three-axle heavy vehicles is established. Theoretical analysis and numerical verification show that the calculated error of the analytic solution of two-hinged arches with a rise-span ratio greater than 1/8 is less than 9.57%, and the error decreases with the increase of the rise-span ratio. Therefore, it can be applied to the calculation and analysis of tied-arch bridges with a rise-span ratio range between 1/4 and 1/5. With the equivalent thrust-influenced line index proposed in this paper, the damage of suspenders and arch ribs of tied-arch bridges can be accurately located. It has been found that the proposed method is more effective to identify the damage of suspenders than the damage of arch ribs does, showing good noise immunity. In summary, this research has provided theoretical support for arch bridge design and evaluation. Combining with existing bridge-monitoring methods, the new bridge damage identification method proposed in this paper has the prospect of realizing the normal health status assessment of existing tied-arch bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering that the effect of solar radiation on the super-high arch dam temperature field remains poorly studied, the calculation accuracy of dam temperature deformation is unable to be guaranteed accordingly. To address the issue, the solar radiation effect is adequately taken into consideration by proposing a practical calculation method based on the ray-tracing algorithm, the precomputation algorithm, and the ASHRAE clear sky model in this paper. With the aid of the ASHRAE clear sky model, the solar radiation received by the super-high arch dam and reservoir water is calculated. The shading effects are calculated by means of the ray-tracing algorithm, and the precomputation technology is introduced to further enhance the computational efficiency. Finally, to guarantee the authenticity of the calculation results, the dam thermodynamic parameters are inversed by employing the hybrid genetic algorithm. Based on the application in a real-life case, we concluded that around one third of the entire dam radial temperature deformation was attributable to solar radiation during continuous sunny days. The analysis results signify a critical role for taking account of the solar radiation in dam deformation calculation. Furthermore, the practicability and utilization prospect of the proposed method was verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The paper considers errors that occur during strain measurement by fiber‐optic sensors based on Bragg gratings, which are mounted on the surface of the controlled object with a connecting material. Errors due to the use of the assumption of a uniaxial stress state in the Bragg grating zone in the strains calculation based on the measured physical quantities are considered. The errors associated with the strain gradient along the Bragg grating and the strain gradient from the measurement zone to the measuring element are analyzed. To answer the question of what strain is measured, the change in the measured strain as a result of mounting the sensor on the material surface is estimated. Models and algorithms for numerical simulation of errors arising in the strain measurement are presented. Numerical results are given for estimating the considered types of errors when sensor is mounted with epoxy adhesives on the surface of isotropic and anisotropic (fiberglass, carbon fiber) materials. Variants of experiments are presented in which various options of nonuniform distribution of strains and a complex stress state are provided in the zones of strain measurement. The experimental results are compared with the results of numerical simulation based on the finite element method. The results of the analysis of the choice of the resonant wavelength from the reflected optical spectrum, which is used to calculate the strains under the assumption of a uniaxial stress state in the Bragg grating, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]