Assessing the efficacy of stainless steel for bridge deck reinforcement under uncertainty using Monte Carlo simulation

Abstract

Bridge engineers seek new materials, configurations and other design elements to minimise rehabilitation frequency and intensity over the facility life and hence, reduce life-cycle cost. This article discusses the potential of stainless steel as a bridge deck reinforcement material. The superiority of stainless steel over traditional steel was evaluated on the basis of long-term agency cost and user cost. Using data from a US Midwestern state, the analysis was carried out for a majority of analysis scenarios. For the deterministic situation, the use of stainless steel as bridge deck reinforcement material was found to yield a significantly higher initial cost but drastically reduced the overall lifecycle costs, and thus is more cost-effective over the long term. For the uncertainty situation, Monte Carlo simulation was used to generate the distributions of the life-cycle cost for the stainless and the traditional steel reinforcement materials. It was found that the life-cycle cost for the stainless steel option stochastically dominates the life-cycle cost for traditional steel. Thus, under an uncertainty situation, the use of stainless steel as bridge deck reinforcement material is also more cost-effective compared to traditional steel.

Sustainability assessment of concrete bridge deck designs in coastal environments using neutrosophic criteria weights

“…Safi, Sundquist, and Karoumi (2015) introduce a life cycle cost assessment technique to help agencies in the exploitation of their Bridge Management Systems through fair tendering processes. Efforts have also been conducted on the optimisation of maintenance strategies and on the selection of the most cost-efficient corrosion preventive design of concrete (Navarro, Martí, & Yepes, 2018a;Sajedi and Huang, 2019) and steel bridges (Cope, Bai, Samdariya, & Labi, 2013;Kere and Huang, 2019). In general terms, studies conclude that the maintenance phase of bridges is an essential source of impacts during their life cycle, and that the optimisation of maintenance is therefore crucial to reduce such impacts.…”

Stochastic Multi-Objective Optimization-Based Life Cycle Cost Analysis for New Construction Materials and Technologies

“…Various studies have proved that life cycle assessment frameworks ( 37 ), especially when used with stochastic evaluations ( 38 – 40 ), are effective decision-support tools ( 41 ) in the practice of bridge management. The results from the proposed probabilistic bottom-up LCCA-based framework and several past studies ( 6 , 38 ) have shown these benefits can be further expanded when applied to new materials or technologies for which actual performance data are limited.…”

Structural performance of stainless steel reinforced concrete members: A review

“…For bridge decks in particular, stainless steel RC was shown to provide a lower overall life cycle cost (LCC) compared with carbon steel RC [65]. Another study compared the cost efficiency of bridge decks using different types of reinforcement including conventional steel and stainless steel reinforcement [66] and it was shown that using stainless steel rebars results in 52% lower overall costs compared with using carbon steel reinforcement.…”