Structural investigation of the snow-melting heated bridge deck based on the thermal field distribution

Highlights: • Three structures of the snow-melting heated bridge deck system were proposed. • The energy utilization and deformation analysis were carried out through FEM. • Greater energy utilization and less deformation are optimization targets. • The optimum structure and parameters were obtained by multi-objective optimization. • The reasonability of the models was verified by lab tests. -- Abstract: This paper aims to improve the energy utilization of the snow-melting heated bridge deck system with a thermally conductive layer (SHBD-TCL) and reduce its deformation caused by the non-uniform thermal field distribution. Therefore, three structures of the SHBD-TCL were proposed, and there are thermally conductive layers and heating cables embedded in different layers. Then, the finite element models corresponding to the above structures were developed. The energy utilization and the deformation caused by the thermal gradient were analyzed, and the embedded spacing and embedded depth were set as input factors. Also, the effective energy ratio and the maximal deformation were set as the optimization targets, and their prediction models were established based on the above input factors. Finally, to obtain greater effective energy ratio and less deformation, the multi-objective optimization was applied to achieve the optimum structure and rational parameters. The optimum structure was selected to conduct the laboratory experiments, which verified the reasonability of the finite element model of SHBD-TCL. The research enriches the thermodynamic structure design theory of the snow-melting bridge system.