Towards Advanced Composite Material Footbridges

The footbridge presented in this paper is located about 3 km from the city of Lleida, in Spain, and was built to cross an already existing roadway, a railway line and the new projected high-speed rail-way line between Madrid and Barcelona. The owners required a new pedestrian structure with minimum maintenance and which would be easy to erect. The footbridge was completed in October 2001. The proposed and accepted construction solution resulted in an innovative design using GFRP pultruded profiles which have no magnetic interaction with the electrified railway line, minimum maintenance costs and was easy to build. Thanks to its lightness, it took only 3 hours to complete the erection of the bridge to its final position.