The Ulttimate Load Test of the Historical Riveted Road Bridge

The paper describes the recent special bridge load test, which was performed in July in Petrov in the Czech Republic. The load test was done on the 115 years old truss steel road bridge. The test consisted on the long- term monitoring, strengthening of the cross beam with the SMA (shape memory alloys) to improve the load capacity and fatigue resistance. Then the bridge was closed, and a series of the dynamic tests was done, such as modal analysis on the undamaged and artificially significantly damaged bridge. Finally, the load test until the failure was done with using of totally 475t of ballast load. The bridge was thoroughly monitored – 96 sensors, laser scanning, laser scanning and geodetic survey. The most important results from the final load testing are published here.