Serviceability assessment and monitoring of aging structures using in-service vibration data

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Deterioration of aging infrastructure including highway bridges and offshore structures has significant societaland human consequences. Progressive damages commonly occur in bridges due to unexpected heavy traffic,deferred maintenance or extreme climatic events. Therefore, there is a need to assess the existing health ofaging bridges and ensure their safe and reliable operation. My industrial partner, the engineering division ofWSP, is strongly reliant on periodic visual inspection-based maintenance methods that are easier buterror-prone and expensive. Ensuring their smooth operation requires newer condition-based maintenance andreal-time monitoring, so that any damage can be detected in a timely and most cost-effective manner. The mainobjective of this proposal is to develop and share with our partner, efficient condition-based maintenancetechniques for the bridges in the City of Thunder Bay. The challenge lies in assessing the local and globaldamage of these bridges through the unusual symptoms detected by the vibration sensors, and then conductingappropriate rehabilitation and retrofitting. This research will develop an automated and remote damagediagnosis and decision making tool that can be readily used to monitor bridges under extreme weatherconditions. As opposed to WSP's current practice of using manual preventive maintenance, the proposedsensor-based technology will enable our industrial partner to automate the process of detecting catastrophicfailures, and therefore minimize overall maintenance costs. Once developed, the proposed tool can be used byour partner or other Canadian infrastructure owners including the Ministry of Transportation of Canada toretrofit critical bridges in other metro cities under adverse weather conditions, thereby making structuralrehabilitation more time- and cost-effective. Such autonomous and remote retrofitting technology will work toreduce the costs of overall maintenance on Canadian infrastructure for both the provincial and federalgovernments.