Sustainable Large Arch Bridge Maintenance through Inspections, Assessments, Monitoring, Repairs and Service Life Modelling

The paper provides an overview of maintenance activities on seven large reinforced concrete arch bridges in Croatia located on Adriatic coastline, built in two periods: in the 1960’s and 1970’s and at the last turn of the century. Inadequate attention to durability issues in combination with very aggressive maritime environment has led to expensive and technically demanding repair works on older arch bridges. The design of more recent constructed bridges took into account the experience from the in-service performance of older arch bridges. Moreover, structural health monitoring systems have been installed on those bridges. As chloride-induced corrosion is the major cause of deterioration of the Adriatic RC arch bridges, a numerical model, which can realistically simulate effects of reinforcement corrosion in concrete is developed and implemented into the finite element code to predict service life of new or already damaged structure.