Temperature changes effects to dynamics performances of a pinned-supported steel-arch-bridge

Seldom is temperature changes effect taken into account in structural design and monitoring. However, in some cases temperature may be the governing load case, especially for a long span bridge. Moreover, statistics have shown that the world's temperature is gradually increasing nowadays and may cause the temperature effect to increase. This may cause an alteration to dynamics parameters of the structure, which will be a highlighted object in this research. These parameters are directly corelated to physical parameters, e.g. mass and stiffness. Hence, as the physical parameters has any kind of change, dynamic parameters will also immediately change. This alteration may modify the health index of the structure. In some regulations, the deviation of the value of natural frequencies, as one of dynamics characteristics, is limited to be 10%. This research is aimed to observe the health index of a determined case study bridge and to observe the effects of temperature changes to dynamics performances of a pinned-supports-arch bridge in the Province of Riau, Indonesia, and it was found, by modeling the structure in Finite Element (FE) Model and performing vibration testing, that temperature difference has caused the natural frequencies of the bridge to vary up to 3.63%.