Integrating reliability and structural health monitoring in the fatigue assessment of concrete bridge decks

Abstract

The overall objective of this article is to demonstrate how the concepts of reliability and structural health monitoring (SHM) can be integrated to create bridge assessment and decision systems. The steel-free concrete bridge deck system was chosen as a specific case study providing tangible focus for the research. The bridge assessment model therefore focused on fatigue cracking issues associated with wheel loads due to heavy truck traffic. The bridge assessment model required five components: a vehicle load model, a fatigue damage accumulation model, a residual strength model, a reliability model and an SHM decision model. Each of these components is discussed within the article with specific reference to previous research on steel-free bridge deck systems. The proposed model is used to develop a decision threshold for monitoring the oldest steel-free bridge deck in service.