PSI - Issue 72

Boris Folić et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 72 (2025) 286 – 293

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Keywords: Soil structure interaction; Žeželj’s bridge in Novi Sad; Prestress soil, caisson, passive earth pressure; integritiet construction 1. Introduction Žeželj bridge in Novi Sad is a concrete bridge fixed at both sides, with RC and prestress concrete. Longitudinal appearance of arch is sickle-shaped, Fig. 1, therefore it has variable hollow cross section, where the maximal moment of inertia is realized at the top of arch and it decreases towards supports. With this type of arch, there is often a problem of support, but this is solved here by expanding the cross-section of arch below the plate, which is visible in Fig. 2b. Let's not forget, the whole project (at the former conceptual level) was done by B. Žeželj on 1 sheet (so two pages) of A3 fo rmat, where all the necessary dimensions of the bridge were drawn with a single formula (for the moment of a simple beam). After that, the entire team of engineers worked for several months on the contractor's project in order to state that there were no significant differences in dimensions between Žeželj's conceptual project and the contractor's project. © 2026 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of Aleksandar Sedmak, Branislav Djordjevic, Simon Sedmak Dr. Simon Sedmak, ssedmak@mas.bg.ac.rs, Innovation Center of Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Belgrade, Serbia

Nomenclature α

angle of tangent to the arch at the contact with the caisson

BS Base Shear in the plane bellow the cassion D f

distance from ground surface to base of footing (cassion)

δ φ

the angle of rotation of the resultant of the ground pressure relative to the wall normal

internal angle friction

tg φ

coefficient of friction, without FOS (factor of safty)

γ

unit weight of soil

Fig. 1. View of the Žeželj bridge, by Pržulj (2014)

The bridge was founded on poor soil, but the problem was largely solved by the presses at the top of the arches, and presses between the reinforced concrete (RC) diaphragms and the caissons on the bank (Fig. 3). All consolidation horizontal settlement and concrete creep were completed within a few months of operation of these hydraulic presses. After that, the bridge structure was monolithic. Even though a whole team of top engineers