Structural testing and monitoring system: box girder bridge case study

Abstract

Inspections is a noteworthy task inside the civil engineers’ community either in testing and maintenance phase of infrastructures. Nowadays, the need of fulfilling safety requirements is occupying a central role in the management of the infrastructure network, since most of the main structures date back to the 1960s and 1970s, when the design was performed with different and less restrictive codes and more limited knowledge regarding the structural behavior. The accomplishment of these requirements has taken an uplift by several strategies which permit a continuous evaluation of structures. Monitoring strategies provide a continuous dataset that gather valuable information on the structural performance in a time window sampling the information with a certain frequency. The data-driven analysis allows the identification of potential undesired behavior of the instrumented elements and the global structure in both, static and dynamic regime, granting fairly quick response and bringing awareness on the current state of the structure. The cutting-edge technique is evaluated with static analysis of the case study of a box-girder bridge characterized by an unknown static scheme, which underwent an intervention regarding the modification of the supports, where the dataset of the pre-intervention and post-intervention displacements of the joints are collected. In parallel with a finite element model, the data analysis brought to light the expected performance of the retrofitted infrastructure.