It is with a tinge of sadness that I write this, as it will be my last editorial for Bridge Engineering. As I have said before, it has been a real honour to be able to introduce you to a wide range of innovative ideas and techniques that have been proposed and employed on an everyday basis by bridge engineers throughout the world. It is hard to believe that it was three years ago that I took over the reins, but I hope that you will agree with me, that during this time the journal has gone from strength to strength.
As I now hand on the baton to my successor, Professor Guido Morgenthal, a regular contributor to the journal in the past, I must say a big thank you to all who have contributed to this growing success. In particular, the members of the Editorial Advisory Panel and the staff of ICE Publishing who have worked so hard to ensure that the journal properly celebrates the ingenuity and creativity of the bridge engineering profession. However, the greatest thanks of all must go to you and our contributors, whose enthusiasm for and dedication to sharing and discussing experiences through this medium is the lifeblood of the journal.
Bridge Engineering has an important role to perform in broadening and developing our profession and its vitality is very dependent on your engagement and contribution to the process. If you would like to discuss any of the papers or contributions to the journal, please email up to 500 words to journals@ice.org.uk. Where appropriate, your contributions will be forwarded to the author(s) for a reply and published as discussion in a future edition of the journal. We would also welcome review papers to establish the ‘state-of-the-art’ in specific aspects of our discipline. The aim of such papers would be to help those that are new to the profession and to update those whose experience is more established, and it is hoped that they would build on the many case studies that already exist in our back catalogue.
One of the down sides of the recent success of the journal is that we now have a significant number of papers that have been accepted for publication but have yet to appear in print. To address this issue we are both increasing the size of our regular editions and increasing the number of papers that we make available for ‘ahead of print’ publication. We hope that these initiatives will minimise the time between acceptance and publication and therefore help ensure that the Proceedings are always current and topical.
In this issue we have a diverse range of papers from authors around the globe, the first three of which have a very practical bias. Järvenpää and Pulkkinen (2012) describe three cable-stayed bridges that have been designed and built in Finland and a fourth which is in Da Nang, Vietnam. In all four cases the authors focus on the aesthetics of these structures and highlight how their designers have ensured that they sit comfortably within their setting.
The second paper presents a much harder engineering study to facilitate the fatigue assessment of structures on the Docklands Light Railway (Jackson et al., 2012). To try and reduce the conservatism that is inherent in the fatigue design of new structures, the paper describes how some elements were strain gauged to identify the real stress ranges that they were experiencing. This data was then used to develop a more realistic analytical assessment approach that could be used throughout the light railway network. It is discussed how comparison with the strain gauge results suggested that the adopted approach was still very conservative but that, nevertheless, very substantial savings could be made compared with the strengthening that would have been required by the conventional approach.
In the third paper a means of designing the collar beams for corrugated steel culverts is proposed (Smith, 2012). Currently there is no specific guidance for the design of such structures either in standards or in the literature published by the suppliers of the culverts themselves. The paper therefore discusses the development of the proposed procedure and illustrates its use in relation to the design and construction of the Smallways North Bridge culvert, which was part of the dualling of the A66 Trunk Road.
The two final papers have a more academic focus. The fourth paper presents a study of the relative importance of the vertical ground motion on the earthquake response of the Karnali Bridge in Nepal, which is situated near an active fault (Shrestha and Tuladhar, 2012). It demonstrates how finite element modelling of this significant cable stayed bridge can be used to explore its behaviour when subject to a range of different ground movements and earthquake characteristics. While the fifth and final paper is from Bangalore in India and describes an experimental study of the use of acoustic emission to monitor the development of damage in reinforced concrete beams (Sagar et al., 2012). What is described is a technique that it is hoped might provide a method of monitoring such structures in the future.
I thank all the authors for their contribution and encourage you, the reader, to either follow their lead and submit a paper of your own or make a contribution to the discussion of the papers that have been published here.
