Aluminium Bridges - Past, Present and Future

Aluminium has a long record of performance for new or rehabilitated bridges worldwide. This paper consists of a historical review of aluminium bridges since 1933, when the first bridge application of aluminium to the reconstruction of a bridge deck at Smithfield Street Bridge, Pittsburgh, was undertaken. In the subsequent 50 years almost one hundred aluminium bridges and footbridges have been built worldwide. The most interesting of them are shortly described in the paper. Nowadays, four main areas of aluminium applications in civil bridges can be pointed out as follows: deteriorated bridge decks replacement, reconstruction of existing bridges, movable or floating bridges and residential area bridges, especially footbridges. The most recent examples of these aluminium applications in bridge engineering are also described in the paper. Finally, the perspectives of aluminium in bridges, connected mainly with a wide variety of new and improved structural materials, are presented.