Condition Monitoring of Concrete Structures

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Canadian aged infrastructures are showing signs of deterioration and damage due to various effects. The 2016 Canadian Infrastructure Report Card (CIRC) concluded that: "under current practices (investment, operations, maintenance), the majority of the infrastructures, even if in good to very good condition today, will require increasingly larger investments as they age." In the particular case for bridges, the CIRC observed that the actual average annual reinvestment rate of bridges is 0.8%, whereas asset management practitioners typically target a reinvestment rate for bridges in the range of 1.0% to 1.7%. This deficit of the actual investment will lead inevitably to prioritizing maintenance projects. For any decision making concerning structural problems, effective approaches are needed for assessing the accumulated damage using advanced sensing and computational technologies. Without the proper advanced engineering tools, the evaluation of the state of infrastructures can be costly and prone to error. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has become a major component to ensure the safety of infrastructures. The goals of SHM can be outlined as: (i) cost effective assessment of structural performance, (ii) detection and localization of damage, and (iii) structural health prognosis. An important component of the SHM is system identification, which focuses on developing an effective and reliable model of the structure through response measurements. Structural system identification requires collecting data from existing structures such as displacement, acceleration and strains. Until very recently, the most common monitoring of infrastructures was carried out using visual examination by trained engineers. With the development of technologies, various other methods have been introduced in the realm of SHM. Nondestructive monitoring techniques used previously included acoustics, thermography, Xrays, images processing and many others which required direct access to all the parts of the structure. This condition is not possible to achieve in case of complex structures. The present proposal attempts to integrate novel technologies including image processing to study specific SHM related problems in structures. The research program focuses on advancing knowledge on SHM applications in accessing the structural integrity of infrastructures. The short term objectives are: (i) to develop a methodology for evaluating damage in existing concrete structures including computer vision-based technology, (ii) to establish a diagnostic tool to evaluate the extension of induced damage in concrete structures, and (iii) to train Highly Qualified Personal (HQP) on the usage of modern technologies in SHM. The long term objective of the research proposal aims at settling the base for developing an integrated tool for SHM.