SOLUTION OF THE CONTINUOUS BEAM IN LAUNCHED BRIDGES

The design of a prestressed or steel launched bridge requires a consid erable amount of static calculation, since the highest launching stres ses hare to he investigated between an infinite number of support conf igurations, and then of static schemes, In practice, this research is done by discretizing the movement of the deck, that is by calculating bending moment and shear force diagrams in a sequence of close support configurations so as tu simulate with adequate reliability the course of launching, to obtain the highest values by envelopment. The necess ity of analysing hundreds and hundreds of diagrams suggests the adopti on of an agile and fast algorithm for the solution of the continuous b eam, The 'reduced-transfer-matrix' method does not suffer from the pro gressive increase of redundants, reduces the problem to the multiplica tion of small square matrices and provides an exact, intuitive.