Review of the Rapid Damage Diagnosis of Medium and Short-Span Bridges

Abstract

Damage accumulation and resistance decrease inevitably happen to bridge structures due to the effects of earthquakes, impact loads, wind load and corrosion during their service time. Once the damages of the key components accumulate to a certain level, they would spread promptly, causing the sudden destruction of the whole structure if not found and dealt with in time. So the structural damages would not only shorten the operation life of structure but also threaten the human lives and financial safety. Therefore, the technology of damage diagnosis of bridge structure holds supreme significance. This paper summarized the current research situation of the existing bridge diagnosis methods and analyzed the characteristics of each method through the reading and studying of the related material both domestically and internationally. Among those methods, only the diagnosis method based on load tests is the most direct and effective one for current bridge diagnosis, the diagnosis results of which shows higher reliability. And the structural dynamic characteristic method based on dynamic load tests could beautifully avoid the disadvantages of the static load tests, becoming the main development direction of rapid diagnosis of bridge. Furthermore, lastly it elaborated the analysis of the key problems of breaking through the development bottleneck of current rapid diagnosis methods of bridge, creating a solid foundation for the future research.