Case Study: Stendess designs a cross-border Rhine bridge with SCIA Engineer

Stendess designs a 290 m Rhine River bridge with SCIA Engineer

Ingenieursbureau Stendess N.V. faced significant engineering challenges in designing a wide-span, double-deck bridge over the Rhine River connecting France and Germany. The primary hurdles included understanding the deck's impact on the structure, ensuring the stability of high arches without transverse bracing, and analyzing the dynamic response to traffic and wind loads. The vendor, SCIA, provided its SCIA Engineer software to address these complex design requirements.

Using SCIA Engineer, Stendess was able to perform advanced stability and second-order analysis, using buckling shapes as direct input for the arch calculations. The software also enabled a dynamic analysis to determine the bridge's behavior under service conditions. This solution from SCIA allowed for the successful dimensioning of the entire 290-meter bridge for both its final state and its complex erection process, leading to the project being named the winner in the Civil Structures category of the SCIA User Contest 2017.

Stendess