A 43 year old, three span prestressed concrete adjacent box beam bridge (35-17-6.80) in Washington Court House, Ohio, needed to be replaced and was considered to be a good candidate for full scale destructive field testing to better understand how this type of bridge behaves under varying magnitudes of damage.
Three magnitudes of damage were created on the spans of the bridge for comparison. However, the scope of this study only covers the center and west spans. Each span was then subjected to loading to monitor how load was transferred to other beams and until the span was unable to resist any additional load to determine the overall capacity of each span. All beams of the bridge were instrumented with strain gages to record strains as well as string potentiometers to observe deflections of the beams as the spans were loaded.
It was observed the capacity of each span was also comparable to the estimated capacity of each span with the applied damage. It was concluded that the bridge does behave well as a system and that the transverse tie rods and shear keys were able to transfer load to adjacent beams.
To validate the results of the destructive testing on the severely damaged west span, a comprehensive finite element model was created. The strain and deflection results from the finite element analysis were compared with the results recorded during the testing of the west span. The model of the damaged bridge span adequately represented the results of the west span testing.