| West Virginia Department of Transportation indicates that a significant number of bridges in West Virginia are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. One third of the nation’s bridges have similar conditions due to the age of the infrastructure and ever increasing traffic demands. The resources available to replace or rehabilitate those structures are finite, hence cost effective means of replacing the inadequate structures is necessary. One of the solutions intended to ease the increasing demands of replacing those structures are standardized bridge plans by providing a cost effective method to save time and resources. Therefore, the focus of this effort is the development of an optimized short-span steel bridge package.;The study focused on developing optimized plans for two roadway sections for spans ranging from 40 feet to 140 feet in 5 feet increments. The girders designed in this effort were optimized based on weight and targeted various cross section depth to span length ratios incorporating homogeneous, hybrid and rolled sections.;This effort also focused on the feasibility of incorporating limited plate sizes in the design of steel girders. Designs from the optimized study and the limited plate size study were compared and evaluated to offer cost and time savings. |
