How much can our bridges carry?
Arto Puurula have studied a 50 year old railway bridge in Örnsköldsvik, which was charged to the breakning point in July 2006 when the new Bothnia Line was built. A new type of carbon fiber reinforcement of the bridge was tested simultaneously.
Arto Puurula, Structural Engineering, have modeled the bridge with the aid of sophisticated computer models and obtained good agreement with test results with a breaking load of 11.7 MN = 1170 tons. This is equivalent to the original bridge without reinforcement would pass 4.7 times the load it once was dimensioned and that after amplification could handle 7.5 times the design load.
The results are of great interest to Malmbanan (The Ore Line) where you want to run with larger and heavier trucks to bring down the cost of transporting iron ore when shipped to the ports of Narvik and Luleå.
