Lightweight Durable Bridge Decking

The use of core sandwich structure architectures enables loads significantly larger than the weight of the core sandwich structure to be carried in bending.The core sandwich structure will be exploited to develop a lightweight, low cost durable bridge decking system to be used with an inflatable bridge.There will be three types of core sandwich structures developed in the Phase I effort.The first core sandwich structure will be the standard deck section, which will be designed to be used exclusively in conjunction with the inflatable bridge structure. The second type of core sandwich structure to be developed is the enhanced deck section which will be designed to be used either in conjunction with the inflatable bridge or separately as an independent short gap crossing bridge.The enhanced deck section will interface with the ramp in both the inflatable bridge deployment and the independent crossing mode.The ramp will be a core sandwich structure that will fold to reduce to the size of the other bridge decking components.The bridge decking sections and ramps will have integral means of connecting to each other and to the inflatable bridge structure.The travel surfaces will have a tough pliant non-skid surface.