The work we carry out in the Pont3 Project has been published in Nature!
The paper “Latent resistance mechanisms of steel truss bridges after critical failures ” is published in Open Access. You can download it for free here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09300-8.
Steel truss bridges are a common type of structure that use many interconnected bars (components) to form a load-bearing system. Several disastrous collapses of this type of bridge have occurred due to initial component failure(s) propagating to the rest of the structure (e.g. the I-35W Minneapolis Bridge in 2007). However, initial failures in steel truss bridges do not always cause such disasters (e.g. a major fracture of the I-40 Bridge in Memphis went undetected for a long time). Despite the importance of these structures, it is still unclear why some initial failures cause catastrophic collapses while others barely affect functionality. In our work, we use a combination of experimental tests and computational simulations to analyse the response of such structures to typical damage scenarios. This allowed us to characterise the fundamental secondary mechanisms responsible for redistributing the loads of failed components and preventing collapse. We show that these secondary resistance mechanisms can be surprisingly effective even after very severe initial failures. These findings provide new insight on how to enhance present bridge design and maintenance strategies to improve the resilience of transportation networks.
This work was carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Universidade de Vigo and forms part of the Pont3 project, which has received funding from the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Grant PID2021-124236OB).
In addition to the article, Nature has published a short video that shows our work, which you can see using the link below.
