251036 Olympic Bridge Flyover: Pile Cap Design

Introduction

A reinforced concrete bridge is to be constructed to alleviate traffic congestion problem and foreseen/modelled traffic
saturation at the Macau Olympic Roundabouts artery.

With the bridge models built from Midas Civil 3D and OASYS GSA (General Structural Analysis)

Bridges are designed in different parts, and different models are built to represent those parts. The parts and models are
prepared by different Teams at Arup.

The simple logic in designing Pile Cap at Arup is that with Finite Element Analysis (Software), each element in that model,
be it element 200 210 that represents a pier, combination of forces of each element or a combination of elements could
be calculated. The goal is that it is impractical and uneconomical to construct different piers with different reinforcement
arrangement, therefore, we need to find the pier with the most critical load and use that as our prime reinforcement
arrangement for our pile cap. While there are many ways of designing Pile Cap, there are other ways available.

My task was to design the steel reinforcement arrangement of pile cap from bridge loads. I was also responsible for using
OASYS GSA software to build a pile cap model and OASYS Ad Sec to build a cross-section model of the reinforcement
concrete, I was also responsible for the calculation of Bill of Quantities and as-built drawing preparations.

Challenges

1. Abundance of information
2. General Sequence of bridge construction and work allocation amongst teams
3. Concept of Reinforced concrete design knowledge (Euro code 2, Macau code and Canadian Code)
4. Software usages (OASYS Ad Sec, OASYS GSA, Bluebeam, Excel)
5. Engineering drawing, Pile Cap RC drawing and markup languages
6. Global axis element axis
7. Longitudinal direction vs. transverse direction.
8. Governing moment etc.

Steps and lessons learnt

Step 0: Organization and Gathering of information and Sequence of bridge design.

While this step looks trivial, it is the key to success, during my way of solving this enigma, I felt like I was solving it in a
labyrinth. Where there were conflicting informations, I was totally confused by everything. Therefore organization and
gathering of information is of utmost importance.

The Organization and Gathering of information could be as such.

Usually in standard engineering preliminary shop drawings, we would have the following information:

1. (Structural design General Description) 251036/DD/4001

2. (Pile Cap General Structural Drawing) 251036/DD/4121

These drawings allow us to know the position of pier, pile cap and the deck, which aids us in the structural
analysis (especially in knowing the eccentricity of force)
We would also need to have the following to understand the layout plan of the pile cap, there are 2 types.

3. (Layout plan of Pier, Abutment and Pile Cap) 251036/DD/4100

 4. OASYS Bridge Model(s)
Building bridge model using OASYS GSA, which is essentially a FEM model that allows one to read each
individual force at each element from different combination of load cases.

5. OASYS Pile Cap Model(s)

Forces from the bridge model is to be inputted into the Pile Cap model for Pile Cap RC reinforcement Design, it is
paramount to understand where the forces