Investigations on Welded Splices of Heavy HD Sections in Net-Arch Bridges

The article presents experiences and recent developments in design and construction of net-arch bridges, using cold-bent hot-rolled HD sections. Gained experience and positive economical footprint is leading to increase in popularity of the solution, together with much better recognition of the technology in the market. The first net-arch bridges, using cold-bent HD profiles were built in Poland about 10 years ago. While the first bridges had shorter spans of about 60–75 m, a recently built bridge has a span length of 120 m. Several other bridges are in design phase, in particular, the first railway net arch bridge with nine independent decks and the largest span of 116 m length.