Structural assessment of masonry arch bridges with settled supports

The masonry bridges still in use in the European infrastructure networks represent a significant portion of the entire stock of existing road and railway bridges. For this reason, and for their age, their maintenance and safety is most important for the owners of road and rail networks. Recent collapses of this type of bridges, have highlighted the fragility of masonry bridges to imposed settlement of their supports. In this study, by means of limit analysis and FEA, the collapse mechanisms of masonry bridges subject to supports settlement were analysed. With the aim to describe the damage configurations in masonry bridges for different types of supports settlement and with the objective to evaluate the ultimate support displacement capacity of the analysed structures.