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Concrete bridges play an important role in the efficiency and reliability of transportation civil infrastructure. Significant advancements have been made over the last decades to enhance the performance and durability of bridge elements at affordable costs. From an application perspective, novel analysis techniques and construction methods are particularly notable, which have led to the realization of more sustainable built-environments. As far as the evaluation and rehabilitation of constructed bridges are concerned, new nondestructive testing approaches provide accurate diagnosis and advanced composites, such as carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP), have become an alternative to conventional materials. This Special Publication (SP) contains nine papers selected from two technical sessions held at The ACI Concrete Convention and Exposition – Spring 2018, in Salt Lake City, UT. The objective of the SP is to present technical contributions aimed to understand the state of the art of concrete bridges, identify and discuss challenges, and suggest effective solutions for both practitioners and government engineers. All manuscripts were reviewed in accordance with the ACI publication policy. The Editors wish to thank all contributing authors and reviewers for their rigorous efforts. The Editors also gratefully acknowledge Ms. Barbara Coleman at ACI for her knowledgeable guidance in the development of the SP.

On the morning of 23 May 2016, a traffic accident happened in the Middle Ring Road between the ramps of Zhenhua Road and Wanrong Road Shanghai, China. A series of on-the-spot tests are carried out and a real-time wireless sensor system is deployed in the bridge. The beam state is reasonably estimated according to the monitoring measurements and the rehabilitation is carried out through 28 steps. Health monitoring measurements show that the beam inclination is below 0.2°, and the beam stays in a stable state after traffic is resumed, which indicates that the repair has met the expected requirements.

Two severely damaged concrete column-to-cap beam specimens were successfully repaired, using a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) cylindrical shell, non-shrink repair concrete, and headed steel bars. The first cast-in-place specimen experienced concrete crushing and longitudinal bars fracture/buckling; for the second precast specimen, the column was completely separated from the cap beam. In this paper, two analytical models, Model Fiber and Model Rotational Spring (RS), simulating the seismic performance of the repaired specimens are proposed. In Model Fiber, plasticity considering bond-slip effects was distributed over the defined plastic hinge length of the nonlinear beam-column element. In Model RS, a non-linear rotational spring was used to consider the concentrated plasticity located at the repaired cross-section. Low-cycle fatigue of the damaged column longitudinal steel bars was included in the analytical models. Simulations show that the analytical results, in terms of hysteretic response and moment-rotation, are in very good agreement with the experimental results. Model fiber performed better for predicting the pinching effect in the hysteretic response of the repaired cast-in-place specimen; Model RS performed better for matching the hysteresis curves of the repaired precast concrete specimen. In addition, Model Fiber was able to predict the local response of the columns including the fracture of longitudinal bars due to low-cycle fatigue.

Employment of corrosion-resistant reinforcement represents a widely-recognized effective strategy to ensure the long-term durability of reinforced concrete (RC) and prestressed concrete (PC) structures. Fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites have proved to be a reliable non-metallic solution, able to ensure both the required mechanical performance and corrosion resistance. FRP-RC infrastructural applications are currently spreading; conversely, FRP-PC bridges are still considered state of the art prototypes. Many are the conceptual and practical challenges accompanying this innovative technology: brittleness of FRP reinforcement, the likelihood of tension-controlled failure, limitations on the initial pull force, limitations on the sustained load that the member can carry, and service requirements that may control the design. Reports published by ACI committee 440 do not yet address FRP-RC/PC provisions in a consistent way. Discrepancies exist on how ACI 440.1R and ACI 440.4R approach FRP-RC/PC design, having the latter not being updated since the first generation of FRP regulations. This paper deals with the philosophy behind the design of the precast Carbon FRP-PC/Basalt FRP-RC double-tee girders and the auxiliary Basalt FRP-RC/Glass FRP-RC members that constitute the structure of a recently built pedestrian bridge. This study is an attempt to address the challenges still preventing the wide acceptance of CFRP in prestress applications and to unify the design approach for FRP-RC/PC structures. This successful case-study validates the proposed rationale and supports a slight relaxation of the design limits in terms of the initial pull force.

Due to increased traffic loads and changes in the code provisions many highway bridges in Germany exhibit deficits in shear capacity according to current codes. The majority of these bridges’ structures comprises continuous concrete beams whose calculatory shear capacity is often exceeded by now. However, the actual shear capacity of prestressed concrete continuous beams is usually underestimated since the design procedures have been derived on the basis of single-span beam tests and neglect significant shear transfer mechanisms. In order to extend the service life of existing bridges, the reserves in the design procedures can be partially taken advantage of by the application of refined design approaches. For this reason, five shear tests on prestressed concrete continuous beams have been performed at the Institute of Structural Concrete of RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Within these tests, the influence of cross-section type (rectangular and I-shaped cross-section), load distribution (concentrated and distributed loads) and the shear reinforcement ratio are investigated. In this paper, the test results of three beams under concentrated loads will be presented.