An application of the FRP girder bridge technology to cope with logistic difficulties

In the year 2013, Acciona Infraestructuras, a Spanish contractor, designed and manufactured a Fibre Reinforced Plastic (FRP) road bridge which is expected to be installed in Gabon in 2014. The bridge girders, originally designed in steel reinforced concrete, were redesigned employing FRPs to take advantage of the lightweight of these materials and the high prefabrication inherent with their use. In fact, concrete, which must be mixed in situ due to the unavailability of concrete plants at a reasonable distance from the worksite, results to be expensive, since the transportation of the aggregates to the worksite is made difficult by the lack of proper roads and bridges. This lack of infrastructure also hampers the use of prefabricated reinforced concrete beams, since it makes extremely difficult moving heavy goods and machineries. The design and the manufacturing process of these two girders are presented in this paper.