The prestressed concrete stress ribbon bridge. A structural system for pedestrian brigdes

Abstract

The construction of rope pathways was common by some of the early civilizations of Asia, South America and Africa. This old idea was recovered in the 1960's with the prestressed concrete stress ribbon concept. Adopting a small sag/span ratio (due to functionality requirements) the flexibility problems of a cable-like structure are solved by means of increasing the dead weight and the cross sectional area. In this paper the structural behaviour governing equations are presented first. Then, this equations are solved for the particular case of a biembedded stress ribbon bridge for the evaluation of the prestressing response and their evolution with time. Finally, the formulation is applied to a draft design of a 80m span stress ribbon pedestrian bridge.