The Design of Modern Steel Bridges - TEDI

36 The Design of Modern Steel Bridges
failure of three big box girder bridges in Britain, Australia and Germany. With
hindsight it is clear that sufficient attention was not being given to some of the
details of box girder design and construction, particularly during construction
when the box girder was not completely built. The research that followed these
failures clarified the buckling behaviour of stiffened plates under complex stress
patterns of combinations of compression, shear and bending and the effects of
unavoidable initial geometrical out-of-flatness and out-of-straightness and of
welding residual stresses.
Standards and codes for steel bridge design and construction were updated
to take advantage of these developments; BS 5400 in Britain took the lead in
these advances in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As a record-span steel box
girder bridge, mention should be made of the Costa e Silva (or Rio–Niteroi)
Bridge across the Guanabara Bay in Brazil with 200–300–200 m (656–984–
656 ft) spans designed by American designers and built by a British consortium
in 1973.