Posted on 01 Oct 2012
Tenaris presented the new bridge built over the River Po (completed in December 2010) to an audience of academics and industry representatives. Joining Piacenza and San Rocco al Porto, the bridge is one of the largest pieces of Italian infrastructure designed and built to comply with strict environmental sustainability criteria.
Professor Mele, who teaches Construction Technique at Rome’s "La Sapienza" University and is also the President of MCA Engineering (the design company for the new bridge and a consultant to the Contracting Company during the construction phase), and Alessandro Giacobbe, Structural Project Engineer from Tenaris, explained that sustainability was a main focus of the work. This was achieved not only by recovering and reusing steel beams from the old bridge, but also through a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study. This study helped to calculate the energy consumption of the proposed construction solutions and to thus adopt the most efficient solution from an environmental impact point of view, addressing particularly CO2 emissions.
In addition, the bridge is one the most innovative in terms of architecture and structure. The classic structural layouts have been eliminated by principal and transversal connecting girders and bolted joints. The use of tubular profiles and the type of welds adopted required in-depth studies to optimize their behavior under stress.
Most noticeably, high strength is guaranteed not just by the tubular profiles and the welded connections, but also by the galvanizing treatments and the specially organized painting cycles which allow maintenance times to be extended.
