National Steel Bridge Alliance
In This Section
Standard Designs
Steel provides great flexibility in the design of girder flanges, webs, stiffeners, field splices, and cross-frames. However, designers routinely face repetitive design decisions regarding material thickness and sizes for the routine steel I-girder bridges.
In fact, two designers could design a steel I-girder bridge for the exact same span lengths and bridge width and implement girders that have completely different flange and web sizes, as well as differing cross-frame layouts and member designs.
As part of the Need for Speed initiative, NSBA is developing straight steel I-girder bridge design templates for single-span bridges as well as two-, three-, and four-span arrangements that are optimally cost-efficient when considering design, material selection, fabrication, and construction.
These templates:
- speed up the design process of I-girder bridges.
- make the fabrication process more efficient and cost-effective.
- optimize and standardize web, flange, stiffener, and field splice plate sizes that can be readily obtained by fabricators from typical mill plate widths and thicknesses.
- provide cost-efficient diaphragm and cross-frame standards for the entire suite of identified bridges.
As NSBA releases these design templates, you will find them here. Below, you will also find our Steel Span to Weight Curves and Continuous Span Standards resources.
Standard Plans for 1-Span Steel Bridges
This template contains tables, diagrams, and design criteria for single-span bridges with a variety of lengths and spacing. |
Continuous Span Standards
The Continuous Span Standards represent an excellent starting point for 3-span continuous steel plate girder design. They serve to help reduce the time required for preliminary bridge superstructure layout, girder plate sizing, and more. |
Steel Span to Weight Curves Graphs
This resource is the quickest way to determine the weight of steel per square foot of bridge deck for straight, low skew, plate girder bridges. You can compare various span arrangements and girder spacings as well as estimate a potential steel cost. |