CROATIAN CONTEMPORARY ACHIEVEMENTS IN BRIDGES

Paper provides a brief overview of Croatian contemporary achievements in bridges, highlighting several structures that were constructed during the past decade or are currently nearing their completion. Most of these structures are located in the Croatia coastal region and thus exposed to extremely aggressive maritime environement. The overview of contemporary achievements has to start with the look into the past, as the experience gained form performance of older bridges under similar environmental and loading conditions, enables designing more structurally efficient and durable bridges in the future. In this manner, in-service performance of large Adriatic arch bridges – Sibenik, Pag and Krk bridges, is described, as well as major structural repairs that were undertaken over the years. Lessons learned from the past experience were carefully considered while designing more recent Maslenica Highway Bridge, Bridge across Rijeka dubrovacka, Krka river Highway Bridge and Domovinski bridge.