Innovative Prefabricated Composite Bridges

The competitiveness of composite bridges depends on different circumstances such as site conditions, local costs of material and staff and the experience of the contractor. Two major advantages of composite bridges, compared to concrete bridges, are the ability of the steel girders to carry the weight of the formwork and the fresh concrete, and the shorter construction time which saves money for the contractor but even more for the road users. A further step is to prefabricate not only the steel girders, but also the concrete deck. In this paper a new concept for composite bridges is described, with dry joints between the prefabricated concrete elements. The principal of the technique is presented as well as some laboratory test simulating the load situation at an internal support in a multispan bridge. Also some experiences from an already built single span composite bridge with dry joints are presented.