America has over 600,000 bridges. Steel girder bridges, among the most common, could face serious infrastructure problems thanks to
man-made climate change.
© AJ Henderson (CC BY-SA 4.0)The supports for the unfinished end of the Dunn Memorial Bridge, which connects Albany and Rensselaer, NY. give a good cross section of girder bridge construction
Infrastructure in America and other countries around the world is aging and deteriorating, as a result of an increase in demand due to population growth and limitation in resources required for proper inspection and maintenance, according to Colorado State University's Hussam Mahmoud, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Mahmoud is the co-author of a new study linking the potential impacts of climate change with the structural integrity of thousands of steel girder bridges transecting America's highways and towns. The study, "Impact of climate change on the integrity of the superstructure of deteriorated U.S. bridges," was published in the peer-reviewed online journal,
PLOS ONE on October 23, 3019.
These steel girder bridges frequently suffer from debris clogging their expansion joints. Expansion joints are what keeps the bridges steady as temperatures cause the steel to expand and contract as the air heats and cools. Because of this thermal expansion, debris removal from the expansion joints is an ongoing job.
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