Arch bridges under test loadings

According to the Polish bridge design code road bridges with spans over 20 m and all railway bridges, before they are given to public usage, all require the conduction of studies during a test loading. This paper is an illustration to the experience in arch bridge test loadings of the research team of Department of Structural Mechanics and Bridge Structures from the Gdansk University of Technology. It concerns the applied computational conceptions and researches on an example of three arch bridges, built between 2005 and 2007. The presented calculations results consists the analysis of spatial construction schemes made using the finite elements method (FEM) and its comparison to the field studies. The goal of the studies is to check the correctness of the construction 's work and of the design assumptions. Arch bridges with the longest spans, visualisation of the computational model, the displacement - deflection graphs of the arch bridge construction, generating the extreme span 's deflections, results of the calculations and field dynamic measurements of the some bridges, example of computation results and field dynamic measurements during the static tests are presented in the paper.