Anchors Built to Last: Navigating the Challenges of 100-Year Design Life in Civil Infrastructure

10 November 2023
Anchors Built to Last: Navigating the Challenges of 100-Year Design Life in Civil Infrastructure
On this page

Projects within Civil infrastructure such as bridges and tunnels are sometimes required to withstand a service life of 100 years. As a result of the extended service life of the structure, certain safety critical connections will also require a matching design life where replacing the connections during the service life of the system is not possible.

Products capable of a 100-year design life do not automatically comply to a 100 year design life requirement. With any design criteria for anchors, the 100-year design life capacity needs to be calculated and compared to the action loads for suitability. Post-installed anchor designs to AS5216:2021 has separate design capacities for anchor capacities for 50 years and 100 years. 

Only chemical anchors are currently deemed suitable for 100-year design life. To obtain a design capacity for 100 years, products must be assessed to the European Assessment Document EAD 330499-01-0601. 

Further to the assessments of the 50-year design life within the EAD, some of the additional testing requirements for the 100 year design life are shown below.

Testing Requirement

50 Year Requirements

100 Year Requirements

Repeated load test

100,000 load cycles

200,000 load cycles

Crack Cycling

1000 crack cycles

2000 Crack cycles

Sustained Load

3 months monitoring

6 months monitoring


The durability (corrosion resistance) of the anchor is not assessed within the test regime of the EAD or AS5216:2021, the suitability of anchoring material for corrosion should be separately assessed and determined by a durability engineer for the project.

For further technical information on our product range, please email [email protected] and one of our engineers will be available to assist.