The Future of Bridge Inspections
The growing concern over our nation’s crumbling infrastructure has given rise to a DMI’s current and soon to be launched solutions to improve oversight and visibility into the structural health of critical infrastructure. DMI’s crack detection, residual stress and digital strain encoder when added to the current state of practice provide measurable incremental structural health monitoring data which has been somewhat limited to visual inspections.

Our nation’s economy depends critically on the reliability, availability and serviceability of its transportation infrastructure. Of the country’s over 600,000 bridges, the Federal Highway Authority has Classified more than 150,000 as either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.

More than 25% of bridges have fallen behind their required 24-month inspection schedules contributing to the uncertainty surrounding the operating conditions of the nation’s bridges. Malfunctioning of civil infrastructure has led to loss of live and resulted in tremendous economic loss.

State of the Practice
Current bridge inspection practice typically entails a team of maintenance staff examining bridge elements for visually apparent structural defects. Moreover inspection scheduling is static where bridges are required to be visually inspected not less than once in a 24-month period. This inspection regime does not account for bridge traffic demands, weather conditions, design methodologies, etc. Thus bridges that receive excessive loading and strain are not moved forward in the inspection queue, while scarce resources are devoted to inspecting bridges that have no discernable fatigue effects. Thus valuable bridge inspection resources can be better matched to the bridges most in need of maintenance.

DMI VALUE:

• Maintenance/Inspection Prioritization:
  Allows local, state and federal DOTs to economize inspection programs, while eliminating the most serious risks to the structural health of the assets.


• Real-time Structural Health:
  Automated, real-time monitoring allows engineers to be notified of any significant changes in structural health rather than waiting for such events to be detected via manual inspection according to a static inspection schedule.


• Reduced Repair Expenditures:
  Early detection of fissures, cracks and other defects can be significantly less expensive to remedy than repairing more mature defects.


• Improved Design:
  Correlate design factors, climate conditions, load patterns, engineering methods, construction materials and a host of other variables to build a better understanding of bridge performance across several design, construction and maintenance parameters.


• Information Sharing:
  Archiving, indexing and aggregating monitored data across several installations, and making such data available to the engineering, design and maintenance communities will improve the industry’s knowledge of real-world bridge performance.

RELATED PRODUCTS:
» Fatigue Monitoring
» Residual Stress Measurement
» Digital Strain Encoder