Economic and durable design of composite bridges with integral abutments (INTAB+)

In the design and construction of bridges, questions of sustainability, maintenance and durability become more and more important for European road administrations in addition to safety and serviceability issues. Therefore integral abutment bridges become highly attractive to designers, constructors and road administrations as they tend to be less expensive to build, easier to maintain and more economical to own over their lifetime. However in Europe less experience in building integral bridges has been gained so far. Therefore in 2005 the European RFCS-projects INTAB has been launched. Within the scope of the project, universities, consulting engineering companies as well as steel producers worked together to develop economic and safe solutions for composite bridges with integral abutments. Significant knowledge has been gained and cost-effective, environmentally friendly and sustainable bridge structures have been developed. Furthermore their durability has been proven to obtain competitive composite bridges for small and medium spans. The outcome of that project was reworked within the scope of the current project to make it available to a larger number of practitioners. To disseminate the knowledge, two workshops have been organised. A design guide was written and translated into German and French. It was completed by a design example as well as CEN-recommendations regarding actual Eurocodes. A software tool was written to help designers to perform some calculations regarding the design of integral abutment bridges. Finally a website was set up to establish a sustainable presence on the web where all information will be available in the future as well.