Rehabilitation of bridges using aluminum decks

Abstract

The rehabilitation of highway and road bridges is without any question one of today's major challenges. It is to keep up with this challenge that this paper presents an innovative bridge rehabilitation technique which consists in using aluminum decking to replace deteriorated bridge decks. Numerical modeling was carried out on a favored type of decking in order to study and analyze its performance under Canadian traffic loads. Also, an economic analysis was made on a case-study bridge, in order to compare the costs of the proposed technique to the cost of the method currently used by the Quebec Ministry of Transportation for the rehabilitation of certain types of bridge deck.Key words: aluminum, bridge, deck, economic study, extrusion, grid method, rehabilitation.