Assessment of the shear capacity of existing prestressed concrete bridge girders

The demands on existing bridge structures have increased over the last decades due toincreasing traffic loads and will continue to rise in the future. In this research project, funded by the Federal Highway Research Institute of Germany, different refined shear design approaches for the shear assessment of bridges have been verified on a short term basis. For this, design procedures from expert opinions on the basis of Level 4 of the Structural Assessment Provisions for Existing Road Bridges were taken into account as well as recent research results. Afterwards, possible modifications of current design procedures and alternative design procedures have been developed and were in part recommended for use within Level 2 of the recalculation guidelines. By this, the assessment and refurbishment of reinforced and prestressed concrete bridges is supposed to become more efficient and economical. The modified and refined approaches were exemplarily used on existing bridge structures. After their validation, the modified approaches and detailing rules have been summarized in form of text modules that were shaped in style of the Structural Assessment Provisions.