Betar

Belver Steel Bridge over the Tagus River

• Location: Belver, Santarém, Portugal
• Solution: Bridges, Asset Management
• Type: Road bridges, Rehabilitation
• Promoter: Infraestruturas de Portugal SA (ex Estradas de Portugal, EPE)
• Client: Infraestruturas de Portugal SA (ex Estradas de Portugal, EPE)
• Scope: Reinforcement and Rehabilitation Design, Inspection, Safety Assessment, Geometric Survey, Anomaly Mapping and Material Testing
• Project: 2010/ 2011
• Construction: 2016/ 2017
• Photography: Eng.º Carlos Sousa (Infraestruturas de Portugal) / Eng. Manuel Almeida (Betar Consultores)
• Contractor: DST S.A. – Engenharia e Construção
• Dimension: 180m long, 50m max span
• Ver no Google Maps

The bridge connects the two banks of the Tagus River in a total length of 180m, composed by a steel girder truss with an upper deck. The bridge has 4 continuous spans, with end spans of 40m and inner spans of 50m, supported by stone masonry columns and abutments.

The services performed consisted of carrying out a geometric survey, a detailed bridge inspection and underwater inspection, and finally, the detailed design for rehabilitation and strengthening of the bridge.

The intervention in the steel structure was carried out on the support grid for the reinforced concrete deck and the superstructure was also reinforced with external prestressing.

The bridge was strengthened to seismic actions by placing reinforcement bars along the entire height of the columns and also by placing HDRB bearings to distribute seismic forces between all columns.