The Experimental Timber–UHPC Composite Bridge

Abstract

This paper describes the development of an innovative timber–concrete composite bridge system and especially focuses on the evaluation of the load tests of an experimental bridge structure. The load-bearing structure was designed as glue-laminated timber beams connected with only 60-mm-thick precast bridge deck segments made of ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC). To verify the production details and behavior of the designed structure, we built a full-scale experimental structure and performed a load test. The load test was arranged as a four-point bending test. First, we performed the overall load test until failure. Some bridge deck segments were consequently cut from the structure in order to run further load tests of the bridge deck in the transversal direction. The results of the experiments were evaluated in detail and compared with analytical calculations.