Remaining Fatigue Life Assessment of Damaged RC Decks -Data Assimilation of Multi-scale Model and Site Inspection-

Abstract

For estimating remaining fatigue life of RC bridge decks subjected to traveling wheel-type loads, presented is the data assimilation procedure, i.e., coupled life-span simulation with inspection data at site. Multi-scale analysis with hygro-mechanistic models is used for the platform of data assimilation on which the visual inspection of cracking on the members' surfaces and the acoustic emission (AE) tomography are numerically integrated. For verification, the wheel running load experiments of slabs were conducted with continuous data acquisition of both crack patterns and the acoustic emission data over the life till failure. Visually inspected cracks are converted to space-averaged strains, based on which the internal strains and damage fields are re-produced by numerical predictor-corrector cycles. The 3D field of elastic wave identified by AE tomography is also converted to the fracture parameter of concrete. Although no information on cracking is available, the proposed assimilation method successfully reproduces most probable internal cracks over the volume of analysis domains, and the remaining life of the deck slabs inspected was successfully estimated.

Computational Life Assessment of ASR-damaged RC Decks by Site-Inspection Data Assimilation

“…Data assimilation analysis with the initial cracking by the pseudo-cracking starts in the middle of lifetime and it should coincide with the referential analysis for practical purpose. Tanaka et al (2017) also illustrated the strain fields of 3D extent which successfully converged to the true solution as well as the deflection by means of the predictor-corrector method.…”

“…More detailed verification of pseudo-cracking method was conducted by Tanaka et al (2017) with non-ASR slabs having the same dimension as the one in this study. Figures 18 and 19 show the evolution of center deflection with both linear and logarithmic scales, in which we see the zig-zag deflection at unload and re-loading of 94 kN.…”

“…The authors proposed the following detailed process and the successful data assimilations for damaged RC slabs were achieved (Tanaka et al 2017).…”

“…Second, for assessment of remaining life of ASR damaged slabs, data assimilation procedure to combine the multi-scale analysis with visual site inspection data is proposed by extending the pseudo-cracking method for normal RC Tanaka et al 2017) to the case of ASR damages.…”

Stiffness Evaluation and Current Status of a Degraded Road Bridge Slab Located in a Mountainous Area

“…Specifically, the responses of the real-scale RC slabs studied by Maeshima et al (2016) were referred for verification and validation processes of the proposed model. Then, the authors developed a data assimilation procedure to combine the multi-scale analysis with visual site inspection data by extending the pseudo-cracking method for RC bridge decks (Fujiyama et al 2013;Tanaka et al 2017) to the case of ASR damages. In the result, it was shown that ASR expansion could enhance the fatigue life of RC slabs.…”