Structural design and environmental impact of infrastructures

IABSE Symposium, Venice 2010: Large Structures and Infrastructures for Environmentally Constrained and Urbanised Areas, 2010

The following paper illustrates the verification of methodologies employed by international agencies to assess theScenic Qualityof a landscape. Several States determine a landscape’svisual qualityusing predictor variables. This research aims to validate the recognized ability of these predictor variables to reproduce untrained observers’ preferences. Three variables have been chosen to analyze a series of Italian landscapes:Vividness,IntactnessandUnity. Photographic inventories were created for different landscapes. Pools of landscape architects judged the slides associated to each landscape using a 7-point scale. Identical slides were then shown to untrained observers composed of 201 students that used a 10-point scale to evaluateScenic Beautyfor each picture. Students’ judgments were then related to the expert judgments using a regression analysis. Road evaluation from the landscape will be a future application using simulation or rendering techniques.

IABSE Symposium, Venice 2010: Large Structures and Infrastructures for Environmentally Constrained and Urbanised Areas, 2010

This paper analyses how urban bridges respond to a different set of rules from road bridges when choosing its bridge type, and developing its design. While road bridges adopt one or other bridge type only based on technical restraints, cost, function and structural efficiency, with limited resulting span scopes suitable for each bridge typology. Urban bridges and footbridges can adopt these designs out of its strict span scope, as no structural predetermination exists, responding to different new factors as: aesthetics, architectural scale, landscape integration, users’ perception, urban planning flexibility, landmark or symbol creation.Examples of urban bridges design are used, including recent arch and cable stayed bridges by Arenas & Asociados. Conclusions attempt to create some simple rules for urban bridge design, as result of local conditions and architectural restraints.

IABSE Symposium, Madrid 2014: Engineering for Progress, Nature and People, 2014

The design of bridges within the highway infrastructure is mostly driven by very cost-optimized and function-based concepts. To raise public acceptance an architectural revision is often undertaken in the design process resulting in very surface-orientated and wrapped-over design ideas using for example colours, haptic effects and cladding. Many solutions remind on historic examples where technics and art were separately treated and displayed causing not only higher expenses but also maintenance problems. In order to adequately combine aesthetics with economical and technical requirements when operating publicly financed highway infrastructure a merged approach is pursued. The aim of this paper is to challenge engineers to be more involved into the creative process of finding suitable aesthetical forms in addition to its structural duties. He is invited to take advantage of the ingenious process of "Structural Shaping" which involves the engineer-technical thinking combined with a sense of evolving aesthetical structures based on structural approaches. In 2010 the Austrian motorway and expressway operator, ASFINAG, launched a design initiative to improve the appearance of its highway and expressway network. With a design guideline for bridges the ASFINAG focuses on the aforesaid targets.

2006

Indicators are a very important guide in decision making since they translate knowledge into easy-to-handle information units. This paper aims to draw attention to a not very explored “market” for engineering design researchers, by discussing the current state-of-the-art of impact indicators for transport infrastructures and the possibilities of more representative results by means of engineering design methodologies, such as life cycle assessment, life cycle cost, and risk analysis. The contribution of these methodologies in the definition and development of indicators has been scarce for the moment; however, the complexity of the impact of infrastructures demands a more comprehensive approach that could be provided by these methodologies.

International Journal of Computational Methods and Experimental Measurements, 2021

The establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 claims for a deep paradigm shift in the way infrastructure structures are conceived. The evaluation of the impacts derived from the construction, the service and the end-of-life stages of an infrastructure is consequently in the spotlight of the research community. Being the construction sector as one of the main stressors of the environment, great attention has been recently paid to the structural design from the economic and the environmental point of view. However, sustainability requires to consider the social dimension as well. The evaluation of the social impacts of products is still at a very early stage of development, so the inclusion of social aspects in the design of structures is often overlooked. In this study, a comparison of life cycle assessment results is conducted on seven different design alternatives for a bridge in a coastal environment. Two approaches are followed: the first approach considers the economic and the environmental aspects of each design and the second approach includes the several social impacts specifically developed for the assessment of infrastructures. These social impacts account for four stakeholders, namely workers, consumers, local community and society. Results show that the inclusion of social aspects shall lead to different preferred options when compared with conventional, two-dimensional approaches. Here, the design with silica fume added concrete performs 11% better from a sustainability point of view when compared with the best solution resulting from a conventional assessment.

IABSE Reports, 2015

The importance of structural art has been gradually emphasized and thereby reflected in recent bridge design codes or guidelines through structural design principles in terms of safety, serviceability, constructability, economy, and aesthetics. This design trend has resulted in numerous variations of the basic bridge types and unprecedented types while leaving both good and bad examples. This study has focused on the typology of contemporary cable bridges focusing on bridge aesthetics. Specifically, this paper have provided the followings: (1) a typology for contemporary cable bridges so that the identification of important factors affecting visual appearance can be made on a structurally sound basis for the classified types; (2) an integrated framework for bridge aesthetics that supports a context-based design comprehensively; and (3) a way of evaluating bridge aesthetics using the integrated framework considering the triad of structural art of form·function·behaviour. The entity-b...

IABSE Symposium Report, 2010

John Dauth, born 1946, received his civil engineering degree from the University of Queensland in 1968 and his Master of Engineering Science from the University of New South Wales in 1975. John has worked for 32 years as a designer with consultants and the last 10 years as a design manager with constructors.