Thermal Effects

Thermal ranges used to be given in the exam but have not been stated in the question since the format of the exam paper changed in 2004.

Nevertheless, they could be important to your design for a number of reasons including:

• Thermal expansion drives the design of movement joints
• Restrained thermal expansion will give rise to stresses. For example, on an integral bridge, the deck is partially restrained by the backfill behind the abutments, which leads to compression in the deck when the deck expands (and tension when it contracts).

The cheat sheet attached provides typical coefficients of thermal expansion for different materials and equations for calculating movement, strain and stress due to thermal effects.