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Structural health monitoring and its application to a bridge with sprayed fibre reinforced polymer repair

University of British Columbia

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is an emerging field in Civil Engineering, which implements the advances in various "high technologies" into developing a diagnostic system for monitoring the integrity of civil structures. With the increasing concern with infrastructure crisis, the demand for SHM has grown significantly over the past decade in response to the urgent needs for better damage detection and monitoring tools. SHM makes remote control, real-time, and continuous monitoring on civil structures possible, which is extremely beneficial, especially in the study for innovative materials/designs and on the prevention for catastrophic failure events. SHM on important civil structures is foreseen to become common practice in the near future, and therefore this thesis is devoted to the study of SHM process, and focusing its application on concrete bridges. The study of the SHM process is done through twofold: extensive literature research and an actual application to a fully instrumented short-span concrete bridge. The literature research includes three main themes: 1.) an introduction on SHM, focusing on the current state of our bridge inventory and the needs; 2.) a study on the global condition assessment methods for bridges, discussed through the four subsystems of SHM: Static Field Testing, Dynamic Field Testing, Periodic Monitoring, and Continuous Monitoring, as well as common practice for bridge inspection/evaluation currently and their problems; 3.) an exploration on the components of SHM process, presented according to Operational Evaluation, Data Acquisition, Data Communication, Data Management, and Diagnostics. The actual application of SHM involved with a shear deficient bridge, called Safe Bridge, being repaired by an innovative technique, the sprayed FRP, invented by Dr. N. Banthia of UBC. Safe Bridge project is the testing bed for both the long-term performance study of the sprayed FRP reinforcement and the SHM process. Two field tests on Safe Bridge performed in 2003 and 2005 are covered in this thesis. Static load and rolling load were applied under certain loading positions and data were gathered from both strain gauges and long-gauge fibre optic sensors. An IP-built-in data acquisition system was also tested for the possibility of remote control on Safe Bridge in the future. Data analysis steps are presented and data comparisons were made to evaluate the condition and field performance of the sprayed FRP. Results showed that the sprayed layer was in similar condition as when they were just applied in 2002, and occurrence of delaminations is unlikely.

Text

2011-02-24

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31764

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

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