New steel bridge design guides available from SCI

The Steel Construction Institute (SCI) has published two new steel bridge design publications that are now available at: www.steelconstruction.info/Bridges#Resources

Produced with financial support from the British Constructional Steelwork Association (BCSA) and Tata Steel, the publications are P185 – Guidance notes on best practice in steel bridge construction (6th Issue), and P406 – Determining design displacements for bridge movement bearings.

The Guidance notes on best practice in steel bridge construction (6th Issue), produced by the Steel Bridge Group (SBG), has been comprehensively reviewed and updated.

Much of the previous advice remains valid but the SBG has taken the opportunity to update and align them with new British and European Standards.

Two new Guidance Notes have been written: one provides guidance on the specification of fatigue quality, reflecting the requirements of the Specification for Highway Works; the second offers specification clauses for tension components, such as high strength bars and strands, to supplement the requirements in BS EN 1090-2.

Determining design displacements for bridge movement bearings responds to an enquiry to SCI’s Advisory Desk about the inconsistent and unclear requirements in BS EN 1991-1-5 and BS EN 1993-2 for the determination of the movement ranges to be specified for bridge bearings.

With advice from the SBG, recommendations have been developed to offer a much clearer explanation of how designers should calculate the movement range, taking account of both thermal change, and uncertainty in the relative positioning of bearings on the sub- and superstructures. These are illustrated with some simple worked examples.