GAINESVILLE, Fla., April 6 (UPI) -- U.S. engineers are ramming barges into bridge supports to test the supports' strength and helping in the design of bridges with greater safety margins.
The experiments, taking place in Apalachicola Bay in Florida's Panhandle region, are being conducted by engineers at the University of Florida and the state's Department of Transportation. They will involve at least a dozen planned barge vs. bridge rammings.
Usually when bridge engineers design structures, they rely on nationally adopted standards that are based on tests using scale models. But scale models are not as accurate at determining the forces on a bridge resulting from a crash.
The barge tests are not designed to bring down the recently closed, old St. George Island Causeway Bridge, which spans the bay from the small town of East Point to St. George's Island.
Instead, the tests jiggle more than 150 carefully placed sensors on the barge and the bridge, producing the first microsecond-by-microsecond glimpse of the forces involved in such incidents.
