Attainment of an integral abutment bridge through the refurbishment of a simply supported structure

Maintenance problems related to existing bridges represent a matter of major concern for road authorities that are recently accepting major construction or retrofitting costs when an initially increased expense would turn out to be economically favourable in a long period. Temporal performance of structures does not depend just on the related performance of construction materials, but is deeply affected by detailing, coupling, static scheme (with the consequent state of stress and deformation) and finally by the boundary conditions (such as environmental condition, volume and kind of traffic). Integral abutment bridge (IAB) concept, as explained in the following, with the elimination of all bearings and expansion joints seems to adequately respond to the mentioned functional demands with potentially limited maintenance problems during service life of the structure. After a concise description of the state of the art and possible inconvenience with IABs, the paper will present the transformation of a simply supported bridge into a IA structure on a total length of roughly 400 m using glued connections at piers and abutments.