Department of Structural Engineering and Building Materials

C-Bridge: Roadmap into design, guidelines and execution of composite bridges in Flanders

(Dutch page)

Composites show an important potential for the Flemish bridge building sector. They are proportionately stronger and lighter than conventional building materials such as concrete and steel, they are more durable than wood and require less maintenance.

 

Particularly, when looking at bicycle and pedestrian bridges, the foreign experience shows that this type of bridges offer an added value. In the context of the greening of mobility, this type of bridges will have an important place in the future infrastructure. But also for road bridges for light and moderate road traffic, for bridge decks and for replacement and extension of existing bridges, the material offers important advantages.


In Flanders there is only know of 4 small-scale bridges in composites. These limited achievements in Belgium are largely due to poor knowledge of clients (governments and private individuals), project managers, designers and contractors, which makes this option either unknown or still viewed with a certain degree of suspicion. In addition, there are no standards at Belgian or European level for the calculation of such constructions, which entails a number of difficulties for the design.


This TETRA project has a global aim to stimulate the design, realization and construction of composite bridges in Flanders, and this by providing the necessary knowledge under the most suitable form. This knowledge transfer will allow the prescribers/contractors to be able to make informed choices but also offer the possibility to various Flemish companies to make the necessary transformation to this new and promising market possible.


The project is divided into 7 work packages:

  1. Knowledge gathering and translation
  2. Provision of the scope statement
  3. Structural analysis and standards
  4. Tender analysis
  5. Execution, follow-up, maintenance and delivery
  6. Long term
  7. Bundling and resonance of project results


There is also a strong cooperation with the user group of this TETRA project and this over the entire project. To achieve this, the user group will meet five times over the duration of the project.

Members of the user group

cbridge24 cbridge8 cbridge9  cbridge10 cbridge11 cbridge12 cbridge13 cbridge14 cbridge15 cbridge16 cbridge17 cbridge18 cbridge19 cbridge27 cbridge21 cbridge25 cbridge26 cbridge29

Research Institutions

cbridge22 cbridge23

Funding 

cbridge24

More information regarding the research project and the published project results can be found on the Dutch project website of the TETRA C-Bridge project here