A composite dowel bridge in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The floods in the Czech Republic in the last few decades have resulted in a significant number of bridges having to be rebuilt. Unfortunately, the work meant long‐term traffic closures for railway bridges, coupled with significant costs for renovation and for providing alternative transport services. As a result, the minimum clear headroom above the design flood level required for new bridges and for reconstructing existing bridges has been increased. This initiated a search for new approaches to designing individual parts of bridge crossings, aiming to comply with the stricter conditions. The research aims to decrease costs in comparison with the costs of raising the finished grade level of the railway, especially at places where adjacent sections such as railway stations etc. are connected.

The evolution of the shape of composite dowels

“…This shear connection is currently being proceeded to obtain European Technical Specification (consistent with rules of Eurocode 4), and appropriate rules have been proposed by the project team SC4.T1 [52], and for purposes of this work, a list of papers considered as "background documents" for the design procedure of composite dowels are investigated and referenced. The list contains publications that include design guides [8,16,23], practical applications (bridges) [2,18,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42], and research [5,6,7,9,13,14,17,20,21,22,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. One can compare this list, which was compiled from the point of view of the author from Poland, with the papers being referenced in German publications [3] to obtain a wide and objective point of view (the first bridges were designed in these two countries as a cooperation between the first two co-authors).…”