Safety and reliability on steel-concrete joint part of hybrid cable-stayed bridge

The innovative concept of using steel girders as main spans and concrete girders as side spans has been applied and developed world-widely in continuous girder bridges, cable-stayed bridges, and suspension bridges. Jointing two different kinds of girders at their appropriate places in a reasonable way will greatly improve the performance of bridges and will easily realize long-span bridges. The new connection structure with prefabricated shear keys for a cable-stayed bridge was adopted and introduced. The model test with the scale of 1:2 for the joint part of the hybrid girder was carried out on site to investigate the safety and reliability performance. In the experiments, distributions of normal stresses, crack resistance ability, slip between concrete and steel were carefully measured to investigate the mechanical performance, force transmission, stiffness matching of the joint part. The findings from the tests were considered to be of special significance to the design of the bridge.