A fundamental study on the improvement and refurbishment of existing bridges

摘要

In Japan, many bridges have been constructed to establish an efficient highway road network since the World War II. The attention has been, however, paid mainly to the construction of safe and standard bridges with uniform quality in design loads as much as possible and neglecting harmony between the safety and surrounding environment of bridges until recently. Nowadays, however, most of them have some troubles, such as fatigue cracks in steel members, cracks in RC slabs, corrosion of steel members and existence of overweight vehicles much heavier than specified in design specifications and so on. As a result, many bridges require substantial strengthening and repairing works. In this paper, the importance of consideration of the harmony between the bridge safety and its surrounding environment in the bridge design and maintenance is discussed by introducing some actual examples in Osaka considering the refreshment and re-creation of some superannuated bridges.