• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.225-232
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• 2002

Recently the slab span-jointing method has been employed as one of the retrofit technologies to enhance the capacity of existing simple beam bridges in many cases. In general this method makes simple beam bridges behave like multi-span continuous bridges under service loads excluding self weight in company with external prestress force method in the field. In this paper the continuation effect has been studied for the retrofitted bridges by the experimental and numerical approaches. The results show that the deflections and stresses of members are reduced due to the increase of the total stiffness of bridge system and the efficiency of bridge continuation based on the slab span-jointing method is about 40 % when comparing with the case of continuous bridges.