Abstract
Abstract The Brazilian federal highway system is largely made up of reinforced concrete (RC) bridges built prior to 1984. Thus, these bridges have incompatible geometry and loading carrying capacity with nowadays traffic. In this scenario, the goal of this investigation was the evaluation of the widening and strengthening procedures used in these RC bridges. The study also includes comparing their performance with the respective new bridges built next to them, which received new highway lanes. This comparison is adequate, considering that, both bridges are inserted in the same environment, are subjected to the same traffic characteristics and have similar spans and structural systems. The results obtained allow us to know the effectiveness of the widening and strengthening interventions carried out, from the point of view of durability, contributing to the improvement of future rehabilitation design for reinforced concrete highway bridges.
Highlights
The reinforced concrete (RC) bridges that make up the Brazilian highway system were built from the 1940s, along with the edition of the first Brazilian standards (DNIT [4])
Considering that the growth of the Brazilian highway system had its apex in the 1960s and 1970s, it is verified that most of the reinforced concrete bridges were built before 1984, that is, they are prior to the validity of the norm NBR-7188 [2] and need strengthening to suit nowadays load carrying capacity
The rehabilitated and the new bridge were inspected on June 7, 2017, following the criteria established by NBR 9452 (ABNT [3]) and DNIT 010/2004 - PRO (DNIT [6])
Summary
The reinforced concrete (RC) bridges that make up the Brazilian highway system were built from the 1940s, along with the edition of the first Brazilian standards (DNIT [4]). In addition of presenting structural problems (either due to the deterioration of the structure as well as the obsolescence in terms of live loads required by the current design codes), these bridges have insufficient cross sections for the current traffic demand (Vitório and Barros [12]). According to Vitório [11], the activities of widening and strengthening of highway bridges began to draw the attention of the Brazilian technical community from the mid-90s, when several works of duplication and / or enlargement of relevant federal and state highways started. These works have shown the need for further studies
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