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Ongoing inspection and maintenance of bridges poses a challenging task for infrastructure owners who must manage large bridge stocks with limited budgets. Drive-by monitoring approaches, using sensors in a vehicle, provide a promising solution to this challenge. This paper investigates the use of the response at the point-of-contact between the tyre and the bridge as a means of monitoring bridge frequency. An expression is derived to allow the contact-point (CP) response to be inferred directly from in-vehicle measurements, expanding on previous studies by allowing the vehicle suspension characteristics to be considered. The sensitivity of the CP-response to the pavement characteristics is investigated in detail and a rigid-disk model is used to overcome issues with how existing vehicle-bridge interaction models consider the interaction between the wheel and the pavement. The feasibility of the CP-response as a measure of bridge condition is investigated and results show that the CP-response significantly outperforms the response measured directly on the vehicle. The CP-response is successful in identifying the bridge frequency and changes caused by damage, without being influenced by the vehicle frequencies. Incorporating the CP-response into drive-by bridge monitoring will improve accuracy over existing methods which use the vehicle response alone.

With increasing demand to transport heavy loads by road, the effects of abnormally loaded vehicles on bridges must be considered. At present in Ireland, when issuing permits for these vehicles, there is no formal loading analysis procedure in place to examine the effects that they will have on bridges. This paper presents the results of a detailed study that was carried out with the ultimate aim of improving current procedures for granting permits to such vehicles by considering the effects that they have on bridges on the Irish Major Inter-Urban (MIU) motorway network. During the course of this study, tools were developed that will allow permit-issuing authorities to consider these effects. The outputs of the project represent a major improvement on the current system, and should ultimately lead to a greater consideration of the load-carrying capacity of bridges when issuing permits for abnormally loaded vehicles.

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