Monitoring of temperature gradient development of highway concrete bridge

Thermal effect is one of very important from the large bridge design procedure point of view. Especially vertical temperature gradient is being crucial. There were realized some research works of the thermal effects monitoring on the concrete bridges in the world. More of them were performed in the USA but only a few at European bridges. The short overview of our long-term monitoring of the temperature load on chosen concrete bridge is presented in this paper. We decided to analyse one concrete box girder bridge that was built by incremental launching method on highway D1 at Slovakia near Zilina city. Recorded temperature gradient was compared with thermal gradients for the concrete box girder bridge recommended by EC 1991-1-5 design specifications.