The maintenance of bridge structures: the case of the Soleri Viaduct in Cuneo

In the month of April 2010, the Provincia di Cuneo commissioned the Politecnico di Torino with the job of designing the unscheduled maintenance works of the Soleri viaduct. The viaduct is a renowned public structure, located at the north entrance to the city of Cuneo. It is an infrastructure of elevated historicalcultural value and of great logistical importance for the city, as it used both for road traffic and for railway traffic for more than half of its length, and is then divided into two separate parts in the final section. The consultation work was divided into three macro-phases. The first macro-phase of the work involved the search for documentary information on the structure, an activity that was carried out in the main archives of the cities of Cuneo and Turin. The aim of this part was that of clearly defining the different historical stages that led to the construction of the structure, motivated by needs of an infrastructural nature and, no less so, by local political requirements. The second macro-phase of the work first concerned the definition of the maintenance planning requests. The graphic plan documentation was drawn up on the basis of this planning. The clients requested that a planning guideline should be drawn up to use as a general reference for the main works, and that it should also contain the intervention methodologies. The third macro-phase had the objective of performing an in depth planning of a specific element of the road decking: the flagstones of the pedestrian paving. It was decided to make these elements in reinforced concrete with polymer structural fibres (FRC). The current state of the research is oriented towards the formulation of different types of mixed design for the design of the pavement flagstones, alternating the use of more consolidated construction techniques in the calculation with the use of FRC without reinforcement in ordinary steel.