At head of title: National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

"This synthesis will be of special interest and usefulness to bridge engineers and others seeking information on design, construction, and maintenance of bridge decks. Detailed information is presented on the causes, prevention, evaluation, and rehabilitation of deck deterioration related to corrosion of steel reinforcement."--Avant-propos.

This synthesis will be of interest to research, specifications, materials, design, and construction engineers; contract and specification administrators; agency project managers and staff; and concrete bridge deck construction contractors. This synthesis describes the state of the practice with respect to the development and present status of waterproofing membranes for concrete bridge decks. This report of the Transportation Research Board describes the use of waterproofing systems applied to new bridge decks and the rehabilitation of deteriorated concrete bridge decks. In addition, this synthesis describes current practice with regard to methods for assessing the effectiveness of membranes, criteria for use, installation practices, and factors that affect the performance of waterproofing systems in new construction and rehabilitation. Suggestions for future research are also included.

"Long Term Durability of Structural Materials" features proceedings of the workshop held at Berkeley, CA in October, 2000. It brought together engineers and scientists, who have received grants from the initiative NSF 98-42, to share their results on the study of long-term durability of materials and structures. The major objective was to develop new methods for accelerated short-term laboratory or in-situ tests which allow accurate, reliable, predictions of the long-term performance of materials, machines and structures. To achieve this goal it was important to understand the fundamental nature of the deterioration and damage processes in materials and to develop innovative ways to model the behavior of these processes as they affect the life and long-term performance of components, machines and structures. The researchers discussed their approach to include size effects in scaling up from laboratory specimens to actual structures. Accelerated testing and durability modeling techniques developed were validated by comparing their results with performance under actual operating conditions. The main mechanism of the deterioration discussed included environmental effects and/or exposure to loads, speeds and other operating conditions that are not fully anticipated in the original design. A broad range of deterioration damage, such as fatigue, overload, ultraviolet damage, corrosion, and wear was presented. A broad range of materials of interest was also discussed, including the full spectrum of construction materials, metals, ceramics, polymers, composites, and coatings. Emphasis was placed on scale-dependence and history of fabrication on resulting mechanical behavior of materials.

Describes several bridging concepts, which were developed and successfully applied during the author's forty years of close involvement with UK and international bridge design, construction, maintenance and research. The concepts mainly apply to the small/medium span range of bridges and viaducts.

Essential infrastructures such as bridges are designed to provide a long-lasting and intergenerational functionality. In those cases, sustainability becomes of paramount importance when the infrastructure is exposed to aggressive environments, which can jeopardise their durability and lead to significant maintenance demands. The assessment of sustainability is however often complex and uncertain. The present study assesses the sustainability performance of 16 alternative designs of a concrete bridge deck in a coastal environment on the basis of a neutrosophic group analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The use of neutrosophic logic in the field of multi-criteria decision-making, as a generalisation of the widely used fuzzy logic, allows for a proper capture of the vagueness and uncertainties of the judgements emitted by the decision-makers. TOPSIS technique is then used to aggregate the different sustainability criteria. From the results, it is derived that only the simultaneous consideration of the economic, environmental and social life cycle impacts of a design shall lead to adequate sustainable designs. Choices made based on the optimality of a design in only some of the sustainability pillars will lead to erroneous conclusions. The use of concrete with silica fume has resulted in a sustainability performance of 46.3% better than conventional concrete designs.

This design guide allies basic knowledge with current engineering experience of the durability of concrete structures. It presents appropriate solutions for different environmental conditions. The complex nature of environmental effects on structures requires improved materials, as well as measures at the architectural design phase, and proper inspection and maintenance procedures.

Long-Term Durability of Polymeric Matrix Composites presents a comprehensive knowledge-set of matrix, fiber and interphase behavior under long-term aging conditions, theoretical modeling and experimental methods. This book covers long-term constituent behavior, predictive methodologies, experimental validation and design practice. Readers will also find a discussion of various applications, including aging air craft structures, aging civil infrastructure, in addition to engines and high temperature applications.