concepts and new perspectives for long span bridges

AbstractA discussion of the dominant factors affecting the behaviour of long span cable supported bridges is the subject of this paper. The main issue is the evolution of properties and response of the bridge with the size of the structure, represented by the critical parameter of span length, showing how this affects the conceptual design. After a review of the present state of the art, perspectives for future developments are discussed

An Interval Uncertainty Based Method for Damage Identification

The problem of damage identification in presence of uncertainties is faced up in the framework of interval analysis. A method previously developed by the authors in the context of model updating and global minimization for dynamic problems is applied to identify the damage in framed structures. The inclusion property of the interval analysis is exploited to find the bounds of the physical solutions. Model parameters, experimental measures and modelling errors are considered as possible sources of uncertainty. The advantages of the interval approach are discussed through numerical simulations involving the different kind of uncertainties