LAST ATC (AIPCR-PIARC SPANISH BRANCH) CONTRIBUTIONS: INTERVENTIONS IN MASONRY ARCH BRIDGES, SAFETY BARRIERS AND BEARINGS IN EXISTING BRIDGES

摘要

The Ministry of Equipment (Ministerio de Fomento) of Spain deals, through its subordinate RoadsrnDirectorate, with a vast amount of bridges all over its assigned road network.rnThe Bridges National Committee of our Spanish AIPCR-PIARC branch, also known by us as ATCrn(Asociación Técnica de Carreteras), has assumed upon itself the task of analysing those keyrnrepetitive cases in order to provide both a rational and technical response to the proposedrnproblems, taking into account the different aspects they hold from either the point of view of thernengineering state of the art, the above referred funding allocation involved and the preservation ofrnthe historical heritage, relevant in some of the related bridges. Further to the above, activity insidernour domestic Bridges’ Committee splits through working groups, reunited around committeeappointedrnleaders tackling those issues, in an intent to improve the condition state of our roadrnbridges by producing a kind of “Monographs” worth to be presented both to the Management andrnto the hole Engineering Community. Four of those ATC “works in progress” have reached a maturernenough state, being the case that some of them have already been published, albeit unfortunatelyrnonly in Spanish, and conforms the set of contributions we are presenting in this Paper. They relaternto familiar-AIPCR-PIARC-range of activities, from Maintenance issues seen from a general point ofrnview and included into the Road Planning from the beginning till sensitive aspects of preventivernmaintenance linked with safety issues or superstructures’ refurbishments (i.e. deck safety barriers,rnexpansion joints and bearing devises). A more particular topic, customary to our country albeitrnpresent at our neighbours, pulls up a forgotten duty driven to recover masonry arch bridges, arnvaluable historical kernel of our network, from misuse if not somehow from a more harmful state.