Structural Assessment and Rehabilitation of Concrete Bridges

The Italian infrastructural network presents some thousand bridges, many of which more than 50 years old and often situated in unfavourable environmental conditions. Transportation agencies are faced with continuous challenge of keeping bridges in good service conditions despite the unavoidable sources of damage leading during time to a deterioration of the structural performance. The need of upgrading the civil infrastructures might arise from many factors, like normal aging, damage induced by particular strong environmental conditions, absence of periodic maintenance interventions, wrong design choices or construction defects, upgrade of the structural safety demand required by codes, some exceptional situations like accidents or earthquakes, and others.

In this context, the problem of structural rehabilitation is receiving a growing attention. Recently, besides the traditional methods using conventional materials, some new rehabilitation techniques using fiber reinforced polymers (FRP) are emerging.

This paper shows the efforts spent by SPEA Ingegneria Europea and Autostrade per l’Italia companies in developing rehabilitation interventions of existing bridges affected by different kinds of deficiencies and problems. To this aim, some applications to structural rehabilitation of bridges using both traditional and innovative techniques are presented.