Reliability-based Structural Health Monitoring of Highway Bridges
Collaboration:
HSU, University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg
Project Description:
Many road and railway bridges in Germany are designed according to outdated design standards or are nearing the end of their service life. Because all structures cannot be economically replaced, or because of their historic value, techniques for bridge monitoring are developed so their operation can be extended beyond their original lifespans. Increasingly, the periodically scheduled bridge inspections using non-destructive testing are supplemented with online structural health monitoring (SHM) systems to monitor the health state during gradually developing damage scenarios and on demand, e.g. after damaging events, such as overweight vehicles, impacts of any sort, storms, floods. Bridge health monitoring is challenging because no bridge and no site are identical, bridge closures for dynamic testing are unacceptable (in particular on Autobahn bridges), and most diagnosis methods require data from the damaged structures, so the pattern-recognition algorithms can be trained—but this data is not available for most bridges. Consequently, no standardized methods exist to evaluate the performance of SHM systems for unique bridges or to optimize the monitoring systems before sensors are installed. The goal of this research project is to make a contribution to the following recurring research questions:
- Value of monitoring. Why should we instrument bridges?
- Performance evaluation. What kind of damages are diagnosable?
- Sensor placement. Where should we place the sensors to optimize the performance?
- Environment. How do environmental changes (e.g. temperature) affect the diagnosis?
- Quality control. How can we assure the quality of aging instrumentation?
Duration: 2021-2024
Funding: Centre of Digitization and Technology Transfer (DTEC.bw)
Contact: Dr. Alexander Mendler