Description
The drainage of highways aims to eliminate all water that reaches the road. In particular, in the thalwegs transposition drainage, consisting of culverts, bridges and beam bridges, the water comes from a watershed and need to be transposed without damaging the highway. These structures aim to guarantee safety to users that travel on the highway and to those who live along its borders, avoiding floods that can cause erosion in the slopes and interruption in vehicular traffic. With the purpose of improving the knowledge regarding the structures of thalwegs transposition located in Taquari/RS, in this study a description of the concepts and criteria of projects adopted for the design of culverts, beam bridges and bridges was made, as well as the application of these criteria in the hydraulic evaluation of three typified structures of this city, that were chosen after a brief diagnosis on all the structures located in the vicinal roads of the city, done through the application of inspection records. The evaluation of the culvert consisted of the hydrological verification with the determination of the project flow rate and the hydraulic verification to obtain the admissible flow rate. For the beam bridge and the bridge, the hydraulic evaluation consisted of comparing the maximum water level with the available height in the structure. By comparison, it was analyzed whether the structures meet the usual design criteria for Brazilian practice, and, for those that do not, engineering solutions were proposed. It was concluded that the three structures are not safe in hydraulic and hydrological terms, since they do not admit the maximum flows for the usual return time for each one.
