A Sensor Platform for Subsurface and Aboveground Inspection of Bridges

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Recent high-profile bridge failures such as the railway bridge over Bow River in Calgary in 2013 and a major roadway in Genoa, Italy, in 2018 have brought the issue of bridge maintenance to the fore. During an interview to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation soon after the railway bridge incident a railway company official said, "[w]hen you have water up so high, and you can't get a diver in the water … and you can't get any instrumentation in the water, how do you tell if there is a problem below? You look at the rails … if the rails are level, nothing is happening below." ******Current inspection and bridge management strategies rely on visual inspections, resulting in qualitative and subjective inspection data. Visual inspections cannot uncover many hidden deterioration mechanisms such as foundation scour. Furthermore, the simplistic state-based deterioration models currently being used lack the ability to reliably address the evolution of many structural deterioration mechanisms. The applicant and his collaborators are working on technologies which overcome such deficiencies in current inspection and management practices. ******Acquiring quantitative inspection data from bridges spanning water bodies (e.g., rivers, streams), especially for those damage mechanisms occurring under water such as scour and degradation of piers, is challenging. However, without such data, it is not possible to calibrate and validate quantitative decision-support tools being developed by the applicants needed to maintain and inspect bridges reliably. The system being requested will be comprised of a mobile surface vehicle, outfitted with several sensors including sonar, vision, lidar and thermal. This platform can be used to build maps which can be interrogated using sophisticated computer vision algorithms being developed by the applicants' teams in order to detect and quantify damage to elements, thereby providing the basis to validate probabilistic degradation models being developed by them. ******This system will present the first of this kind capability and will support the Canada Research Chair, Discovery Grant and the collaborative activities of the applicant. Three graduate student trainees will work on developing this platform and in using the data so acquired to inform probabilistic deterioration models for bridge maintenance planning. The inter-disciplinary skill set as a result of the proposed activities will impart the necessary skills and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow. ******Impacts of climate change are already being manifested through increased rates of flooding, thereby putting a large number of bridges spanning rivers and streams in Canada and world-wide at risk. Hence this research is both timely and beneficial, as the activities proposed by the applicant and his team would support and drastically improve current inspection and bridge management strategies for such vulnerable bridges in Canada and elsewhere.********