A design approach to implement reuse of existing concrete bridge girders

To stop the depletion of natural resources, reduce climate change and fight biodiversity loss a circular economy in 2050 is pursued. In the upcoming years a challenging opportunity arises. Many existing bridges and viaducts with bridge decks consisting of prefabricated concrete girders have to be replaced. These girders although not designed...

Material-structure integrated design optimization of GFRP bridge deck on steel girder

Design optimization of fiber-reinforced polymeric (FRP) composite products is essential to facilitate their applications in engineering structures. For bridge structures, the main design optimization goals are the reduction of FRP material consumption and the structure weight, which aim to reduce the initial construction cost and achieve a...

Monitoring Shear Behavior of Prestressed Concrete Bridge Girders Using Acoustic Emission and Digital Image Correlation

In the Netherlands, many prestressed concrete bridge girders are found to have insufficient shear–tension capacity. We tested four girders taken from a demolished bridge and instrumented these with traditional displacement sensors and acoustic emission (AE) sensors, and used cameras for digital image correlation (DIC). The results show that AE...

From Seismology to Bridge Monitoring: Coda Wave Interferometry

Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world and its stability assessment is of utmost importance for society. Ultrasonic measurements are one tool for investigation of concrete stability. The goal of those measurements is the derivation of damage sensitive parameters. The way ultrasound diffuses through concrete is affected...

Long Span Buoyancy Bridge with Submerged Cable Anchoring

The purpose of this MSc thesis is to find a feasible concept for a circa 4500 m long buoyancy bridge, which is located at the Sognefjord in Norway. The concept should be structurally and aesthetically competitive. In contrast to bridges on shore with fixed supports, a buoyancy bridge is supported on floating pontoons. As result, loads will cause...

Shear or bending? Experimental results on large t-shaped prestressed conrete beams

Experimental results of four shear tests on two large prestressed concrete beams are compared to nonlinear analysis and design code calculations. The beams have a length of 12 m and a depth of 1.3 m and are reinforced with stirrups and pre-tensioning. The four tests consist of a single point load at a distance of 2.7d from the support. A priori...