Out with the Old
When the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay, Fla., was partially destroyed in an accident twelve years ago, officials at the Florida Department of Transportation decided to replace...
Measured to the Max
Engineers looking to model the behavior of a structure under seismic conditions often ignore the best source of data available: the building itself. Full-scale measurements of vibrations...
Instrumenting the `Y'
Segmental bridges are still relatively new to the U.S. and questions persist about their design and behavior. To expand the knowledge base, a number of laboratory and field studies have...
Put to the Test
In the construction industry, the concept of life-cycle cost applies not only to the infrastructure itself, but to the materials that go in to building that infrastructure. To improve...
Calendar: Bridges 1993
Featured bridges are: West Lilac Road Bridge (CA); Pine Bank Arch (NY); South Presa Street Bridge (TX); Peacock Lock (PA); Northampton Bridge (PA); Bridge of the Gods (WA); Main Street...
Cables and Anchorages
The following types of cables are generally used in cable stayed bridges: Parallel bars; Parallel seven wire strands; Parallel or semi-parallel wire cables; Locked coil strands and ropes;...
Dynamic Wind Loads
This chapter is concerned with the motions of cable stayed bridges that arise as a result of wind action. The aerodynamic phenomena that must be considered are vortex shedding, torsional...
Special Considerations for Railroads
In comparison with highway bridges, railroad bridges are generally characterized by a larger ratio between traffic and dead load, larger braking forces, smaller relative width of the bridge...
Seismic Design
For seismic design of cable-stayed bridges, the following characteristics are of importance: The cable-stayed bridges consist of various components with different structural properties;...
Sending Steel Down the River
Completed last October 1990, the Roosevelt Lake Bridge is now the longest two-lane, single span, steel-arch bridge in North America, spanning 1,080 ft. Also, the longest steel arch bridge...
White Steel for Osaka Bay
Wind, earthquake and aesthetics were the design determinations for Japan's Higashi-Kobe Bridge. The designers also had to consider the man-made bay infill site and a directive...
New Support for Pin-Hanger Bridges
To promote safety of their bridges, many state highway departments are considering ways to add auxiliary support to existing pin-hanger bridges. The Pennsylvania DOT and its open-end consultant...
Trouble on the Waterways?
Crumbling highways and bridges can cripple the U.S. economy. A lesser known transportation problem is the condition of our inland waterway system. Waterways are a cost-efficient, environmentally-sound...
Vine Street Reborn
Following decades of controversy and a four-year construction effort that threatened to drive both engineers and local motorists crazy, Philadelphia's Vine Street reopened...
Beyond Engineering: The Politics of Maracaibo
The Lake Maracaibo Bridge in Venezuela was built in 1959. It ranks as one of the largest and longest bridges in the world at the time it was built and contained the longest concrete cable-stayed...
An Approach to Evaluate the Sufficiency of Highway Bridges for Nuclear Spent Fuel Transportation
The transportation of radioactive spent fuel can have a significant impact on bridge structures located on designated routes. Due to the critical nature of the cargo and because of the...
Knowledge Representation for Bridge Design
An implementation of a frame-based knowledge representation language (KRL) for development of expert system applications in highway bridge design is presented. The frame-based KRL is used...
Expert System Applications for Bridge Engineering
Expert systems (ES) are computer programs that attempt to simulate the reasoning processes and knowledge of a human expert. The particular problem of bridge analysis/design is a prime...
Optimized Models for Predicting Structural Response in Highway Bridges
Optimization techniques are a viable option for modeling bridges that have been field tested. The error between the experimental strains and the analytical strains is minimized by adjusting...
A PC-CAD System for Prefabricated Steel Bridges
A microcomputer-aided analysis and design system for prefabricated steel bridges is presented in this paper. The system was customized to perform all the required engineering to analyze,...
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