Engineering Commons^™

A Comprehensive Protocol For Inspection And Assessment Of Aging Steel Bridges: Experiments, Computations And 3d Laser Scanning Of Field Corroded Girders, Georgios Tzortzinis

Doctoral Dissertations

According to a recent evaluation, our nation's infrastructure has increasingly presenting signs of deterioration with some elements exhibiting significant deficiencies in conditions and functionality. Regarding the transportation network condition, from the over than 600,000 bridges which are included in the National Bridge Inventory, 46,154 of them are characterized as structurally deficient with the backlog of bridge rehabilitation needs estimated at US$125 billion. Among the many aspects of structural deficiency, corrosion is considered a common cause, both for reinforced concrete and steel bridge deterioration. For steel bridges, corrosion has historically triggered bridge failures resulting to fatalities and injuries. To prevent similar …

Impacts Of Using Tubular Sections In Open Web Steel Joists, Hollis (Cas) L. Caswell V

Honors Theses

Open web steel joists are lightweight structural trusses used in place of I-beams to support long-span floors and roofs of open space buildings. Their slender geometry makes them highly efficient in resisting flexure, but susceptible to out-of-plane buckling in a failure mode known as lateral-torsional buckling. This failure can be avoided by running lateral bracing between joists called bridging or potentially by using tubular sections to build up the joists rather than angle sections.

It is possible that a joist design using tubular cross-sections could require less bridging and prevent the need to use erection bridging for initial joist construction. …