Structural Engineering & Statics
where the load goes
Series

Integral bridge — the series

One essay so far on this idea, and more questions about it than one essay answers.
  1. The summer that is worse than the one before it. The earth pressure behind an integral abutment, summer by summer, as a multiple of the at-rest value it started at. A 60 m deck expands by 10.8 mm at each end and pushes the abutment into the backfill. Granular soil under cyclic strain densifies, so the same movement next year needs a higher pressure to achieve, and K climbs from 0.38 toward 0.96 — a factor of 2.49 on the force, reached after about a century. The design load on an integral abutment describes the bridge's whole life rather than a load case, and it is the only load in this collection that gets larger because time has passed rather than because something was added.

    The summer that is worse than the last

    An expansion joint is a hole in a deck that leaks salt water onto the bearings underneath it. Remove it and the thermal movement does not go away — it goes into the soil behind the abutment, twice a day for a hundred and twenty years, and granular soil under cyclic strain gets denser.

    part 1 · structures

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