Common practices in assessing conditions of concrete bridges

Abstract

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.

Decision Support Model for Allocating Maintenance Budgets for Bridges

“…In the current practice, the main criterion in determining the bridge priority for maintenance and budgeting is the overall condition of the bridge [3]. Thus, condition assessment of bridges is a key task in aiding maintenance activities by providing a concise description of the current state of the bridge in terms of the internal and external damages, which might impact upon the safety and the performance of the structure [4]. In addition to condition assessment, other criteria should be considered in determining the bridge priority for maintenance and budgeting, such as taking into consideration the importance of the traffic of this bridge, the age of the bridge, and many other factors, which will be highlighted and discussed in the literature section.…”

Ground penetrating radar-based deterioration assessment of RC bridge decks

“…Over the past 20 years, GPR theory, technique, and technology have developed significantly (Jol, 2008). Recently, GPR has been used widely to assess and locate corrosion of the reinforcing bars in bridge decks based on the many advantages it retains over the other NDT technologies (Alsharqawi et al, 2017). These advantages include its ability to detect both metallic and nonmetallic objects, it can survey a large area in a short time, and the most important feature which makes it very suitable for bridge decks is that it is applicable in the presence of an asphalt layer.…”