Construction and monitoring of sustainable concrete bridge A7957 in Missouri, USA

Self-consolidating concrete (SCC) is a highly flowable nonsegregating concrete that can be placed without any mechanical consolidation and thus has the potential to significantly reduce costs associated to transportation-related infrastructure. In addition to SCC, innovative materials such as High Volume Fly Ash Concrete (HVFAC) also provide a significant potential to produce more cost effective mixtures for Cast-in-Place (CIP) concrete. Since the 1930’s, fly ash – a pozzolanic material – has been used as a partial replacement of portland cement in concrete to improve the material’s strength and durability, while also limiting the amount of early heat generation. From an environmental perspective, replacing cement with fly ash reduces the concrete’s overall carbon footprint and diverts an industrial by-product from the solid waste stream. The objective of this implementation project was to investigate the in-situ performance of SCC and HVFAC by monitoring the serviceability and structural response both short-term and long-term of the members of Bridge A7957, built in Osage county, Missouri. The study described in this paper had three major phases: instrumentation and fabrication of precast prestressed (PC/PS) girders, construction and long-term monitoring of Bridge A7957. The results obtained from this two-year study enabled to set certain specification requirements for future project implementations.