Abstract
Bridge condition assessment is an essential step in bridge management. To ensure safety and serviceability of bridge infrastructure, accurate condition assessment is needed to provide basis for bridge Maintenance, Repair, and Replacement (MRR) decisions. In Canada and the United States, visual inspection is the common practice to evaluate a bridge condition. Meanwhile, this practice is limited to detect surface defects and external flaws. For subsurface defects, Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT&E) technologies are being used to supplement visual inspection. This paper reviews the common practices in assessing concrete bridges’ conditions and discusses the limitations of available condition assessment models. Further, this research studies six NDT&E techniques and establishes a set of selection criteria which is utilized to compare each technique in terms of providing the best inspection results. Based on the comparison, it is found that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) appears to be the most appropriate NDT&E techniques for inspection of concrete bridges. Thus, this paper recommends integrating GPR technology with the dominant visual inspection practice in order to establish a more accurate overall bridge condition rating system where surface and subsurface defects are assessed.
Highlights
Deterioration is a foremost problem in any structure during its operation
Being aware of the fact that the best selection or combination of Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT&E) technologies should be determined based on full cost-benefit analysis, due to the time limitation, it was determined in this study that only one NDT&E technique is employed and only technical benefits are considered for its selection
In order to improve that inspection process, many studies have been executed to account for this uncertainty and subjectivity
Summary
Deterioration is a foremost problem in any structure during its operation. Bridge deterioration results in having more than 26% of Canada’s bridges fall under fair, poor and very poor categories and a value of $50 billion is required to replace all of these assets [1]. The aging problem of bridge infrastructure is similar in the US as statistics show that about 28% of concrete bridge decks is either structurally deficient (SD) or functionally obsolete (FO). ASCE estimated that $20.5 billion of annual investment is needed to eliminate the country’s bridge deficient backlog by 2028 [2]. The report graded bridges’ conditions as “C+” which refers to mediocre that requires attention. Bridges in North America and the growing problem of deterioration across the globe, condition assessment of bridges has been the subject of ongoing research
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