The Research Unit Steel Structures teaches the design and dimensioning of modern steel and composite structures, meeting the production, assembly, and maintenance requirements. Research projects are oriented to the tasks of contracting clients.

One research focus deals with a design method for a highly thin deck plate for railway bridges as an alternative to a thick solid steel deck slab. Various boundary conditions resulted in the need for a design alternative to the solid steel deck slab. This initiated the development of a new deck slab type, the so-called SCSC (steel-concrete-steel-composite) sandwich plate, with research into the occurring load-bearing mechanisms. The aim is to develop practical design models to enable this construction method to be launched on the market.

Another research focus deals with the influence of the ballast superstructure of railway bridges on the vibration behavior during train crossings. The behavior of the ballast superstructure is initially investigated in principle with large-scale test facilities to ultimately obtain relevant characteristic values for describing the stiffness and the dissipation capacity, representing essential input parameters for modeling. The research objective is to substantially reduce the discrepancy between the measured and computationally determined accelerations, which is well-known in bridge dynamics. Therefore, multi-body modeling is applied to realistically capture the dynamically complex interaction behavior of the vehicle, ballast superstructure, and bridge structure when a train passes over a bridge.