Economic Feasibility of Fiber-Reinforced Bridge Decks

Remember all that time ago we went to the library to learn about the databases and figure out different ways to search for our topic? Well, another term for flexible concrete is fiber reinforced concrete and the Federal Highway Administration shared a study conducted in the West Virginia University that tests the economics of using the concrete as a bridge deck. Unfortunately, the link for this study is a direct download of a word document to the study. So, if  you follow the link here it will bring you to the google search i conducted. Then, the second listing titled, "Economic Evaluations of Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Bridge..." is where the document can be found. After jumping through all these hoops to get the article, the conducted study is actually extremely interesting. For this study, the researchers checked the life cycle cost of the bridge deck. The life cycle cost includes construction and demolition costs, which are the initial cost to build the material and the final cost of the material during its removal. This cost also includes the repair costs that may occur throughout the life of the material. The issues that they ran into within their study is that, due to the extremely high initial cost of the flexible concrete it, currently, can not be competitive with standard concrete. However, they conducted an estimation of the future initial costs of the material and found that, due to the curve sets of data, the material should become economically feasible to use as bridge decks within 10 years. This isn't exactly what I wanted to see in the study, honestly. I was hoping to see that, based on the life cycle data, that the flexible concrete would be economical to use. Unfortunately, that is not the case. But, 10 years, is an extremely short amount of time and with the way technology is always changing nowadays, it could occur much quicker.