Construction Process of Vaults in Masonry Bridges: The Importance of Centrings

ABSTRACT

Existing masonry bridges may appear to the eyes of observers as “natural” pieces, as though they had been there since ever. Nevertheless, their construction required large efforts and engineering skills. The interest on studying the building processes lies not only on the contribution to the construction history, but also on the importance of such a knowledge when assessing and refurbishing masonry bridges. This article aims to partially shed light on the lack of technical (and historical) knowledge that still exists on this topic. In essence, it provides information on centrings as a fundamental auxiliary structure employed for the building of bridge vaults. This goal is achieved by reviewing the technical literature on the topic (mainly Spanish, French, German and Italian treatises) and carrying out some numerical analyses on three different rigid centrings, with the goal of understanding their structural behaviour, and estimating their internal forces, deflections and reactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Arch
• centring
• construction process
• decentring
• deflection
• falsework
• masonry bridges
• structural behaviour
• vaults
• wood

Acknowledgments

Benedetta Orfeo would like to thank the Fundación Agustín de Betancourt for the financial support of this research through a PhD research grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ This name is rather redundant, since alcántara (al-qántara) is the Arab word for “the bridge”.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundación Agustín de Betancourt.