University of Texas at Austin. Center for Transportation Research

NTL-HIGHWAY/ROAD TRANSPORTATION-Bridges and Structures

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Project 0-5574 “Curved Plate Girder Design for Safe and Economical Construction,” resulted in the

development of two design tools, UT Lift and UT Bridge. UT Lift is a spreadsheet-based program for analyzing

steel girders during lifting while UT Bridge is a three-dimensional finite element program for analyzing partially or

fully-erected steel girders during construction. The implementation project introduced these software tools to the

Austin and Houston districts through hands-on training sessions. Through interviews, emails, and phone

correspondence, TxDOT engineers provided the developers with feedback on modifications to the user interface

necessary to improve the application of the software to TxDOT bridges. Based upon recommendations from

TxDOT engineers, the software was modified. Training modules were also developed as a part of the training

sessions. These training modules are distributed with the software so that new users can familiarize themselves with

the software capabilities with well defined problems.

US Transportation Collection

5-5574-01