Method Suitable for Updating the Boundary Condition of Continuous Beam Bridges

The boundary support conditions of continuous beam bridges play the great influence on the results of the structural analysis, but it is difficult to accurately model the boundaries owing to the complexity structure of constraint conditions. To address this issue, a parameterized method is proposed to update the boundary support conditions in this study. First, the connection stiffness at boundary is considered as the optimization variable, and then the optimization problem of updating the boundary conditions are described in detail based on the theory of finite element model updating. Second, for verifying the proposed method, a loading test was conducted on an actual three-span continuous beam bridge. With the proposed method, the discrepancy between the measured modal parameters and the analytical results are greatly reduced; therefore, it is shown that the proposed method is effective for updating the boundary support conditions of actual continuous beam bridges.