Alternative Deck System for Moveable Bridges

Florida has the largest stock of moveable bridges in the United States. More than half of these bridges are located along the inter-coastal waterways in Miami and Ft Lauderdale. Most of the moveable bridges use open grid steel decks. These open grid decks have several disadvantages, including poor skid resistance, high maintenance costs, high noise levels, and susceptibility to vibrations. It is therefore desirable to find alternative deck systems with better performance. Three potential deck systems: a lightweight aluminum bridge deck system made by SAPA Group (Sweden), a waffle shape reinforced ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) deck system, and a fiber-reinforced polymer tube-UHPC composite deck system were selected for further development and experimental testing. The first system is currently commercially available while the latter two systems are newly proposed composite systems. The component-level tests on all three systems and system-level tests on the first two systems are presented in this paper. Results confirm that the first system is a feasible alternative (already available) to the open grid steel decks from a strength and serviceability point of view. The proposed UHPC composite systems are promising alternatives based on preliminary results.