Quality Control Plans for Girder and Frame Bridges

Abstract

<p>Infrastructure managers works every day according to some kind of Quality Control Plan (QCP) in order to ensure a desired quality with minimum traffic interruption balancing cost, risks (implicit or explicit) and performance. These QCPs varies significantly among European countries, which urges the establishment of a common European guideline. COST TU1406 Working Group 3 has the aim of providing a detailed explanation of the steps towards the establishment of a QCP. The approach is generic and evaluates performance values with due attention to: 1) Structure and its constitutive element incl. background material such as birth certificates, 2) Time-dependent Performance Indicators (PI) from observations (e.g. spalling) with due reference to the underlying deterioration processes (e.g. alkali-silica reaction) and 3) Related Key Performance Indicators (KPI) based on the Dutch risk-driven maintenance concept RAMSSHE€P [1]. This paper outlines QCP's for concrete girder and frame bridges.</p>

Existing Bridges – Burden or Opportunity?

“…• Based on the design documentation, relevant failure modes need to be defined. These failure modes correspond to the critical load situations used in design and • for each failure mode, vulnerable zones (see [20] and [21]) are to be defined, in which damages have the largest impact on safety and serviceability. Experienced inspectors know intuitively where these zones are, but they can confirm themselves with the readily available information in [22].…”

Untitled

“…• Based on the design documentation, relevant failure modes need to be defined. These failure modes correspond to the critical load situations used in design and • for each failure mode, vulnerable zones (see [20] and [21]) are to be defined, in which damages have the largest impact on safety and serviceability. Experienced inspectors know intuitively where these zones are, but they can confirm themselves with the readily available information in [22].…”

Inspection of Existing Bridges – Moving on from condition rating

“… Based on the design documentation, relevant failure modes need to be defined. These failure modes correspond to the critical load situations used in design and  for each failure mode, vulnerable zones (as in [4] and [5]) are to be defined, in which damages have the largest impact on safety and serviceability. The definition of failure modes is already discussed in previous chapter.…”