Quality control of road bridges in Poland

Dynamic Tests in Bridge Health Monitoring

“…Dynamic tests play more and more important role in health monitoring and management of bridge infrastructure (e.g., [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]17,20] ). The tests may be carried out both in a permanent way by means of built-in gauges mounted on a structure as well as within systematic inspections and arranged tests of a limited duration with application of external measuring devices.…”

“…In Bridge Health Monitoring process, the results of dynamic tests are generally applied for (Figure 2): -identification of loads − assessment of the magnitude as well as the spatial and temporal distribution of forces acting on a structure, [3,5,7,16,22,25] -structural system identification, typically based on dynamic parameters [2,4,6,13,17,25] and focused on structure stiffness, boundary conditions, integrity and so on, -identification of overloading [13,21,25] by abnormal heavy vehicles, caused by collisions, blast loadings and so on, -detection and identification of defects by means of analysis of changes of the bridge dynamic parameters, [1,11,14,19] -updating of numerical model of the structure on the basis of experimental data, [9,13,[17][18]25] -identification of fatigue process based on analysis of stress spectrum in structural elements of the bridge. [9,20] Generally, the results of bridge dynamic tests create background for assessment of bridge structural condition and for the prediction of the remaining service life of the structure.…”

“…In Poland, the dynamic proof load tests of bridges [17] are standardized in separate but similar codes for steel structures [23] and for concrete structures [24] . The tests are performed under predefined loads in the form of vehicles (trucks or locomotives) as well as special controlled exciters.…”

“…Taking into account the bridge structure excitation method (see Figure 2), two types of groups of dynamic characteristics can be distinguished: -vibration parameters of the structure subjected to a specific load, mainly special vehicles or normal traffic (simultaneous vibration of the bridge and vehicles), identified during the so called operational tests with ambient excitation, [5,[8][9][10]13,17,20] -parameters of the vibrating bridge structure itself (modal tests) identified during forced vibration or free vibration tests. [2,12,14,18] Operational tests usually use typical traffic (vehicles, trains, pedestrians) as the source of excitation to identify the response signal of the structure on the specific dynamic load.…”

Strategies and tools for the monitoring of concrete bridges

“…The creation and development of effective bridge monitoring systems are subjects of research in many countries, [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] as well as an important topic of a number of international research projects, including: Discussion on this paper must be submitted within two months of the print publication. The discussion will then be published in print, along with the authors' closure, if any, approximately nine months after the print publication.…”