Reasonable Construction Procedures and Control Methods for a Concrete-Filled Steel Tube Arch Bridge Erected with Low Buckle Towers

For the erection of an arch bridge with the method of inclined cable-stayed buckle, differently from high buckle tower scheme, the remarkable characteristic of low buckle tower scheme is that buckle cables near the vault have small horizontal inclinations and can provide minor vertical component forces. Take the Mengdonghe Bridge of Zhangjiajie-huayuan Expressway in Hunan Province of China as the engineering background, reasonable construction procedures and control methods were gained by mechanism analysis and numerical calculation of Finite Element Method under different construction procedures. The results show that: i) buckle and anchor cables should be loosen and removed before the pumping of filled concrete, ii) the order of the pumping of filled concrete should be from top chord steel tubes to bottom chord ones, iii) the loading sequence of spandrel constructions should be symmetrical from vault to skewback in classification with strips.