ANALYSIS OF MULTI-BRANCH MULTI-CELL BOX GIRDER BRIDGES

Vlasov's thin walled box beam theory, which accounts for the distortion of the cross section, is combined with special shear lag warping functions to derive a box girder finite elenent model with exact shape functions. The governing differential equations are used to derive the exact shape functions and the stiffness matrix and nodal load vector are developed based on these. The paper describes the computer program in which the proposed procedures are implemented, and two numerical examples are presented which compare the proposed method with facet shell finite element analyses.