Reinforced concrete and masonry arch bridges in seismic areas: typical deficiencies and retrofitting strategies

This book collects the extended versions of selected papers presented at IABMAS 2012 and invited papers originally published in a Special Issue of Structure and Infrastructure Engineering. These papers provide significant contributions to the process of making more rational decisions in bridge design, assessment, monitoring and maintenance. The editors would like to thank the authors for their contributions and hope that this collection of papers will represent a valuable reference for scientific research and engineering applications in the fields of design, assessment, monitoring, and maintenance of bridges and infrastructure networks. Chapter 1 In recent years, appraisal of the condition and rehabilitation of existing bridges has become an ongoing problem for bridge owners and administrators in all developed countries. Reliable methodologies are therefore needed in the assessment and retrofit design phases, to identify the vulnerability of each bridge class. This chapter describes the main degradation processes and typical original design defects of several common kinds of arch bridges, in both concrete and masonry. It discusses rehabilitation operations on the original structure, making an innovative contribution in providing an overview of several examples rather than focusing on general aspects. By means of real case studies, the chapter describes a methodological approach with the aim of eventually helping to develop standard intervention procedures on common types of reinforced concrete and masonry arch bridges included in stocks of bridge management systems.