of the
beam. The pads are designed to carry vertical loads and to accommodate
horizontal movements of the bridge girders. They are also designed to
deflect horizontally under shearing-type forces. The slenderness of the
beam (span length over beam depth) is limited to a minimum of L/17
due to aesthetic, ground and specific road transportation considerations,
where L is the span length. A 20-bar element structural model
was first used for a linear elastic analysis of the beambefore being connected
to the slab; then, stress resultants and reactions are calculated by
a stiffness matrix program using a 2-D mesh with 20 bar elements and
21 sections for each beam,which are connectedwith three bar elements
for each of the 21 sections. The entire bar model has 103 bar elements
and 84 nodes, for which a linear elastic analysis including gross section
properties is used. The construction sequences and the long-term interaction
between the precast beam and the cast-in-place concrete were
considered to design the elements and analyze the structural response
of the bridge in each phase. The details of the structural model can be
found in the work by Martí et al. [30].