Test-bed Development for Long-term Monitoring of Small Bridge Asset Management

Abstract

A Ab bs st tr ra ac ct t While Category 1 and Category 2 bridges are intensively inspected and carefully managed, many small bridges that are not in the Category 1 and 2 are often forgotten until they decay in serious condition. Since many of these small bridges located in the populated city, failure of them would cause huge negative impact on the community. This paper focuses on the small size concrete bridges for timely repair and rehabilitation work for the effective operation and management. Test bed is developed to define the key parameters to forecast the long term performance of the bridges, mostly concrete box bridges. Key parameters suggested in this paper are cumulative fatigue due to repetitive heavy traffic loads and the acid attacks for concrete material deterioration. The cumulative fatigue is measured by the use of the mileage concept. For the long term data collection and inspection, stable and easy to use data collection system is installed as a test bed. The contribution of this research work is on the development of the test bed to define the key parameters of bridge deterioration.