Advantageous bridge construction with prefabrication

In comparison to the extensive period of time spent within the engineering and procurement stages, very short construction period is almost always required. The usual reasoning by the public highway agencies (i.e. project owners) for that is the effort to cut the construction costs, while the road user costs are usually ignored. This paper discusses the advantages of the prefabrication on the construction site over the traditional cast-in-place approach mainly regarding the speed of construction. Its advantages include the acceleration of construction due to parallel production of the lower structure and bridge’s supporting structures, minimum impact on the existing transport network, i.e. lowering the road user costs to the possible minimum, better quality control, higher durability of the resulting structure and often also cost savings via the economies of scale. Paper further discusses the development of the bridge building with the usage of the prefabrication approach in the Czech Republic and how the system of prefabricated beams and segments have evolved till today. This newly improved way of building bridges has proved to be efficient even in the construction of the highway network’s most demanding projects. Technological improvements, such as the use of high-quality concrete or new generation of prefabricated segments which provide new bridges with a long service life with minimal maintenance needs are assessed. Transferring the main construction activities after completion of the lower structure outside the bridged area is proposed. In a permanent production plant, high quality concrete elements can be achieved thanks to the high stiffness of the mold and considerable manufacturing accuracy. The classic method of constructing bridges with a medium span of mounting in symmetrical brackets from segments have successfully returned between frequently used technologies and especially the speed of construction gives this technology a good perspective to the future. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Diamond Congress Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Creative Construction Conference 2018.