I-35 Bridge Research Paper

The report debates the Tacoma narrows bridge failure and the different theories of how it came about, using information about what type of bridge it is and the forces acting on it before and during the collapse. It also discusses ways in which the failure could have been avoided, from changes in the design to modifications to the bridge after its construction.

Suspension bridges were important before 1940 and are still important today. Major cities such as San Francisco, and Manhattan both have a suspension bridge. Suspension bridges are,” a bridge having a deck suspended from cables anchored at their extremities and usually raised on towers” (dictionary.com). Due to the fact that suspension bridges are not completely supported throughout the length of the bridge, past bridges were unsafe. For example, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a suspension bridge opened on July 1st, 1940 (Mark Ketchum). This bridge marked a huge point in suspension bridge safety and engineering, because in collapsed approximately four months after it was opened (Parsons). The collapse caused such a shock, that suspension

In Washington, the Interstate 5 bridge, which crossed the Skagit River, collapsed last month. The damage of this accident included two cars broke and three persons injured. According to officials, the bridge fell into the river after the large truck hit a beam. The bridge had a risky condition called facture critical. The U.S has a lot of bridges; however, nearly two thousand bridges were built between the middle of 1950s and the 1970s, so those ones are obsolete bridges. In addition, back then, the government cut corners in bridge buildings to cost reduction. Although gas and diesel taxes attempted to allocate to restored the bridge, the government cloud not collect money enough to repair the bridge because people began to use efficient vehicle.

The I-35W Mississippi river bridge also known as Bridge 9340 officially was an eight-lane, steel truss arch bridge which carried the Interstate 35W across the Mississippi river connected the downtown east and Marcy-Holmes. Its construction began in the year 1964, was finally opened in 1967. It connected the northeast of Metrodome on its south end and the University of Minnesota on the North end. The bridge was the boundary of “Mississippi Mile” downtown riverfront parkland. The north foundation of the bridge was near the hydroelectric plant built in 1988. The south abutment was in an area polluted by the coal gas processing plant. There weren’t any mentions of this in the failure investigations. The bridge was a continuous truss bridge that had a total span of 1,907 ft. It was an 8-lane bridge having a width of 113.3ft. and was 115 ft. high. It was designed by Sverdrup & Parcel to 1961 AASHO (American Association Of State Highway Officials) standard specifications. The construction contract worth more than US $5.2 million at the time, went to Hurcon Inc. and Industrial Construction Company, which built the steel trusses and deck. The piers were not built in the navigation channel instead the center span of the bridge consisted of a single 456- foot steel truss over a 390-foot channel being the longest span of the bridge.

There are many differences between our bridge and other bridges. One being location. Another one being that thing that was sacrificed for it. Another one being cost. Also another difference would be weight and capacity, and the size or length.

•September/2016 - After the layout of the gravel and topsoil has been accomplished the next process is to begin the building of any bridges over waterways and boardwalks to include low, wet spots that were unable to be dugout. Due to the use of equestrian or ATv usage the bridges will need to be structurally strong using items such as steel or high strength treated lumber.

The I-35W Bridge, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a bridge that opened in November of 1967 and was designed by Sverdrup & Parcel and Associates, Inc. The bridge had a truss arch design that spanned a total distance across the Mississippi River of 1907 feet. Also, the bridge was a deck truss which means the roadway was located on top of the truss itself. With a total of 4 piers, 2 on either side of the Mississippi River, that supported the bridge, the I-35W Bridge crossed the Mississippi River in 3 main spans; the longest span, which was located directly above the river, was 458 feet long. On August 1, 2007, the I-35W Bridge collapsed and sent the 80+ vehicles on the bridge into the Mississippi River.

Bridges are structures that become very susceptible as time passes. In Oregon there have been many bridges being identified to be seismic vulnerable. In an article by Ed Jahn, he sates, “nearly sixty percent of state-identified lifeline bridges likely to collapse or be potentially taken out of use after a quake” (Jahn). Bridges are a whole different story because they aren’t easy to be re-evaluated when they are used constantly by people to get around. The problem with many of these structures, though is that more than half of these bridges were built before 1970 (Jahn). Because of this they aren’t reinforced with new building codes making them highly vulnerable to any disaster to the point of collapsing. It isn’t an easy thing to fix the problems with a bridge because many seem stable but are still at great risk. It is known that “Today, they're still building fracture critical bridges with the belief that they're not going to break,” (Rosenker). Even when a bridge is being identified to see if it’s stable a lot of the time they are thought to be ok, but are really in a bad condition. Because they aren’t fully evaluated, and if a disaster were to hit in a certain location it could cause the bridge to

Hecox (2011) says that the arch structure of the Tillman Bridge makes the canyon walls hold the weight of both vehicles and the bridge itself. In addition, the arch structure allows a better vision of the canyon for the drivers, which was a request of the population to the engineers of the project. In the other hand, according to Jones (2015), the truss structure of the new St. Anthony Bridge also was requested by the population because they wanted to keep a truss bridge in that place. The author also affirms that the St. Anthony Bridge is a truss, but the project team proposed adding a posttensioned concrete bottom chord to the steel truss in order to reinforce it. The project team made this choice because one bridge in Minnesota has collapsed in 2007, and the engineers wanted to lessen the fracture-critical issues to avoid a new catastrophe. In addition, this posttensioning approach wiil make the structure redundant for both resiliency and long-term durability. In conclusion, both bridge's structures were right chosen in order to provide safety and beauty in both

In 1989, an earthquake caused the top deck of the bridge to collapse. This has raised concern in recent years in the case of a large scale earthquake. During an inspection in September of 2009, a 1.5 inch crack was found in a structural truss called an eyebar. The system of the truss is meant to distribute report will describe the tensile load from the weight of the bridge over 4 eyebars. One of them being broken, this same load was now distributed between only 3 eyebars. Because these eyebars were not designed to carry extra load, it became crucially important to repair the eyebar as soon as possible. However, because the bridge is so old, its mechanisms were more complex than what would be designed now in the current day. The engineering company C.C. Myers was contracted to do the repair. C.C Myers decided to repair the eyebar by welding a crossbar to the saddles which had been placed on each end of the broken eyebar (Alfrey, 2010). Four tie rods were then bolted to distribute the tensile load (Reid, 2010). This repair was completed in only 70 hours (Carlsen,

If the truck weight increases beyond first cracking, flexural cracks will propagate in all directions and cause yield in steel girders, which may lead to a collapse of the bridge such as collapse of the interstate 35 bridge near Minneapolis in United States. It collapses due to overload by heavy trucks as shown figure 1.2.

most bridges are steady bridges, this means that they have no shifting components and stay in one area till they fail or are demolished. Temporary bridges, which includes Bailey bridges, are designed to be assembled, and taken aside, transported to a awesome website on line, and re-used. They may be vital in military engineering, and also are used to carry website online visitors even as an vintage bridge is being rebuilt. Movable bridges are designed to transport out of the manner of boats or other varieties of site visitors, which would possibly in any other case be too tall to healthful. Those are typically electrically powered.

High rate of population grow and improvement in the technology forced individuals to move to rural area. As a result, they use more and more personal vehicles for traveling and commuting to urban areas and big cities each day. On the other side, most bridges in Canada and United States by now are more than 50 years old. Therefore, soon or later, rehabilitation or replacement on bridges are unavoidable (John R. Fowler). However, how to manage the bridge rehabilitation or replacement by having minimum effect on traffic is one of the biggest concern for engineers all around the world.

Corrosion occurs when there is a chemical reaction the environment. For corrosion to occur you must have either two different kinds of metal, oxygen and water. Corrosion impacts the truss bridge by corroding the bridge making it weaker. The blue parts of the sketched bridge are where corrosion would impact the bridge the most. It would impact the blue parts because it is where most of the bolts are located. Corrosion can occur in the blue parts because bolts and nuts most commonly have different metal then the bridge does

A bridge is a structure providing path over an obstacle. When constructing a bridge, obstacle can be a river, railway track or a valley and the path provided by bridge can be for a road, pedestrians, a railway, pipelines, viaducts to carry water from rich areas to dry cities, or for commercial purpose to host commercial buildings such as restaurants and shops. A bridge can also be laid to reduce the distance of travel which in turn reduces the time to reach the destination.