COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ALTERNATIVE DESIGNS OF ABUTMENTS FOR BRIDGES

Abstract

The goal of the present work is to compare the cost effectiveness of alternative designs of abutments so as to help the designer to judge the suitability of different types of abutment in a particular situation. The appropriateness of various forms of constructions to different situations and ranges of spans is a judgment usually attributed to experience, but when design parameters becomes large, human intuitions and experience does not remain very effective. In addition to this, during manual design when the designer arrives at a particular section after a preliminary design, he is often tempted to ignore other options due to lack of time and initiatives. The cost of providing the substructure to a bridge deck often represents more than half of the total bridge price. The existing literature reveals that lot of research works are going on in the field of substructure design. However, comparison of various structural forms is the one area where still lot of study needs to be done. Presently India is concentrating on rapid growth in infrastructure. In this regard lot of bridge construction works are going on in the country and country needs economic design for bridge substructure and superstructure so as to develop small cities with the pace of Indian rapidly growing economy. The cost being one of the major factor in selection of a particular type of abutment, it is taken as the deciding parameter for the purpose of comparison study of different types of abutment. In the present work, two types of abutments namely gravity type of abutment and frame type of abutment are considered for comparative study. The bearing capacity of the soil, bridge span, height of the abutment and cost of material are selected as the parameters for the comparative study.