A review of temperature action and effect of concrete-filled steel tubular bridges

Abstract Concrete-filled steel tube (CFST) has been widely applied in bridges due to its excellent structural and constructional performance. In CFST bridges, temperature action is not only an important but also a special load that must be considered in bridge design, construction and structural evaluation. This paper presents an overview on current researches of the temperature action and effect of CFST bridges. The historical and spatial characteristics as well as corresponding influencing factors of temperature distributions are summarized, and classifications of temperature actions are also reviewed. Results show that in-depth investigations of the contributions of temperature influencing factors can help to effectively reduce the adverse temperature effects on CFST bridges in the design stage. Due to the lack of long-term measurements and insufficient use of historical meteorological data, research on the representative value along with correlation analysis of CFST temperature actions and meteorological parameters have to be further carried out. In the meanwhile, a decomposition method of temperature distribution is proposed based on structural effects of CFST bridges in this paper. The decomposed temperature actions can be used for more accurate effect calculation than traditional temperature action classification method, especially for CFST truss bridges. At last, specific temperature action patterns still need to be investigated in some of the special problems, such as longitudinal temperature differences along the CFST arch rib and thermal debonding in the CFST interface. Further investigations are required on the accurate simulation of temperature distribution of CFST bridges considering the shading effects of components and terrain.