Analysis and Control of Highway Bridges for Life Extension

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9800136 Bergman This award focuses upon the dynamics, control and reliability of short span highway bridges, many of which have experienced a sharp decrease in expected service life due to loading induced by heavy truck traffic. Some of these bridges are approaching the end of their useful lives and will require extensive rebuilding or replacement unless alternate, preferably less costly, ways are found to reduce stresses and strains that arise from traffic loads. The project examines several aspects of this problem, including the development of high resolution control-oriented models that account for important effects such as vehicle-structure dynamic interactions, bridge and roadway condition, and traffic intensity, as well as identification and evaluation of candidate intelligent response reduction schemes that work primarily through tuning of individual vehicle suspensions and bridge parameters. The problem embodies a number of components particularly related to problems of scale and structure and to interplay between computations and data. Among the former, the dynamic interaction of potentially many vehicles with the bridge under highly variable traffic conditions, with concurrent adaptivity of individual vehicle suspensions prior to entering and even while on the bridge, represents an extreme case of multiple scales in both space and time. The latter is, of course, highly contingent upon remote sensing, communications, adaptivity, and assessment, all in real time, and represents a real challenge to the computation/data interface. ***