Development of An Orthotropic Composite Slab System for Road Bridges

Large increases in traffic loads led to extensive fatigue damage to existing orthotropic steel roadway slabs of bridges. Reinforced concrete bridges and conventional composite bridges are less susceptible to fatigue but considerably heavier. With the so‐called ortho‐composite‐slab (OC‐slab) a lightweight and robust construction is currently being developed as an alternative to existing construction methods. The basic ideas for the design are explained and an overview of the objectives of the AiF‐FOSTA research project P1265 [1] is given. An overview of the experimental test program is given in section 3.3 It is used to determine the load‐bearing and fatigue behavior of the OC‐slab with composite dowel strips. Detailed information on tests on dowel strips in longitudinal and transverse direction are presented in [9]. Furthermore, application examples in practice are shown in section 4.