Department of Steel and Timber Structures

The Department of Steel Bridges and Structures came into existence in 1951 by means of splitting the Department of Building Structures. The first Head was Prof. F. Lederer. In the year 1959 it obtained the present name - Department of Steel and Timber Structures. A long-time Head of this Department was Prof. A Tesár, who is the author of the steel structure of the cable-stayed New Bridge across the Danube in Bratislava and is one of the founders of modern steel structures in Slovakia.
 The Department teaches subjects related to the design and construction of steel and timber structures such as theory, design, construction and experimental analysis of building structures, bridges, and special engineering constructions with steel, timber and composite load-bearing systems.
The scientific, research and expert activity of the Department is focused on research, design, realization, diagnostics and reconstructions of load-bearing structures and bridges from steel, steel-concrete, timber, aluminium, glass, membranes, cables and their combinations. The research topics are material characteristics, behaviour of members and joints, stability problems, thin-walled systems, development of new types of progressive constructional systems and the effective usage of timber and its composites. The department laboratory has modern equipment.
The department staff co-operated on the design of steel bridges across the Danube (New Bridge, Harbour Bridge, Mária-Valéria Bridge in Štúrovo, Apollo Bridge, Dunaújváros Bridge in Hungary), steel and composite steel-concrete road bridges (Sverepec, Mosonmagyaróvár, renewal of bridges across the Ipeľ River), footbridges and pipeline bridges (Winter Harbour – Bratislava, Dolný Kubín, Voznica, Kralupy nad Vltavou). 
The department has a long-term cooperation in diagnostics and solution of theoretical and constructional problems of bridges and pipeline system of the transit gas pipeline on the territory of Slovakia.
Such outstanding personalities worked at the Department as Prof. F. Lederer, Prof. A. Tesár, Prof. E. Chladný, Prof. P. Dutko.