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STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING AND ASSESSMENT OF CRITICAL INTERMODAL TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE ELEMENTS | ||||
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Kirk Grimmelsman, Ph.D.
January 1, 2009 – December 31, 2011
The principal objective of this project is to develop, investigate, and refine structural health monitoring technologies, methods,
and procedures for the specific goal of enabling more rapid and reliable safety evaluations of critical transportation infrastructure
elements in the aftermath of natural or man-made hazards. Structural health monitoring of constructed systems is a concept that has
gained considerable interest for improving the reliability and cost-effectiveness of management decisions related to the maintenance,
repair, retrofit and renewal of critical inservice infrastructure assets. More importantly from the perspective of emergency management,
response and recovery operations, structural health monitoring is a unique paradigm that provides the capability to rapidly and remotely
evaluate the structural integrity and safety of critical transportation structures in the aftermath of natural or man-made hazards.
Although the technologies required to support the structural health monitoring paradigm have advanced tremendously over the past several
decades, this capability currently does not exist in practice. This project seeks to develop the methods and procedures necessary, in the
context of a structural health monitoring framework, to enable rapid and remote evaluations of structural safety and integrity for highway
bridge structures. Highway bridges are selected as the focal point for this project as they represent especially critical and vulnerable
components of the transportation infrastructure that frequently serve as choke points for emergency response and recovery operations.
Highway bridges are constructed systems having unique design and performance characteristics. The uncertainty associated with the in-service
performance and condition of these structures presents a significant challenge for quantitatively evaluating their in-service condition to
support more reliable and cost-effective long-term maintenance, repair, retrofit, and renewal decisions. This uncertainty presents an even
more significant challenge for evaluating the short-term structural integrity and safety of these structures in the immediate aftermath of
hazard events. Presently, all evaluations of structural condition and safety are based on visual inspections of each individual bridge structure.
These visual inspections must be performed by specially trained engineers or technicians, and because they require a physical presence at each
individual bridge structure, they are time consuming, physically challenging and particularly inefficient for supporting emergency response
and recovery operations following a hazard event. Visual inspection is both subjective and manpower-intensive and therefore impractical for
rapid and wide-scale implementations following hazard events. Furthermore, visual inspection unnecessarily exposes the inspectors and other
emergency responders to the dangerous and/or often hazardous conditions that will further delay the emergency response and recovery operations.
The following research questions are addressed:
1. What instrumentation components / packages are currently available to monitor the physical condition of critical
transportation infrastructure elements?
2. What techniques/instruments/equipment are available for rapid, remote, near-real-time assessment of the physical
condition of critical transportation infrastructure elements post-incident (man-made and/or natural)?
3. Can a single solution be developed to satisfy both Questions 1 and 2?
4. How can instrumentation components / packages best be deployed to provide real-time condition assessments of critical
transportation infrastructure elements, considering site characteristics, economics, and other factors? What are the physical /
communications /operating conditions related limitations of such deployments? How can these limitations be overcome, or at
least ameliorated?
Product: In Progress (DHS MBTC-1104)
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