Benefits of Steel Bridge Construction

Steel is a flexible and effective material that may be helpful to build bridges that are both efficient and long-lasting, especially for long-span bridges or bridges that require greater seismic performance.

Fremont, CA: Steel bridges, such as highway bridges, railway bridges, and footbridges, are very common across the globe in various structural shapes with varying span lengths. The strength, flexibility, ease of manufacturing, and speed of construction are the key benefits of structural steel over other building materials. It has a substantially higher tension and compression strength than concrete, as well as a strong strength-to-cost and stiffness-to-weight ratio. Steel is a flexible and effective material that may be helpful to build bridges that are both efficient and long-lasting, especially for long-span bridges or bridges that require greater seismic performance.

Steel has the strongest and most desirable strength attributes of all bridge materials, making it ideal for most bridges with the longest spans. The compressive and tensile strengths of normal construction steel are 370 N/sq mm, nearly ten times the compressive strength of medium concrete and a hundred times the tensile strength. Steel has a unique property called ductility, which allows it to bend significantly before breaking because it begins to give over a specific stress threshold.