Infrastructure Inspection During and After Unexpected Events - Phase IV

Identifying the loading capacity of bridges in cities during and after natural disasters, such as river flooding and ground movement, is a very complicated and expensive task. Lives and financial resources can be saved, and critical supplies can be delivered to the affected areas if civil infrastructure damage conditions and bridges’ loading capacity are available to emergency responders and repair planners during or immediately after the extreme event. During flooding, for example, hydrodynamic loading on the bridge depend upon both the speed and the height of the water in the river. These hydrodynamic forces, depending on whether the bridge is inundated, will put the bridge under stress conditions that are different than the normal conditions, and that may reduce the bridge’s operational-loading capacity. Therefore, one goal of the proposed work is to predict the bridge loading capacity during flooding, thereby informing the weight and possibly the velocity of road-vehicles that can be allowed to cross the bridge during the events. While the performance and loading capacity of bridges are expected to change after the extreme event due to damage and other structural changes, existing computer finite element (FE) models of healthy bridges may not give realistic estimations of the bridges’ loading capacity. Therefore, substantial work has been done in the literature, and is ongoing in many current projects, toward developing effective structure-updating schemes. Research in the time and frequency domains has been reported, but with limited success in real-life field applications. While work has been seen toward updating bridges under vibrational loading conditions, not much work has been seen toward updating bridges under flooding conditions.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $169797
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3551747107

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  Mid-America Transportation Center

  University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  2200 Vine Street, PO Box 830851
  Lincoln, NE  United States  68583-0851
• Project Managers:

  Stearns, Amy

• Performing Organizations:

  University of Iowa, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

  3100 Seamans Center for the Engineering Arts and Sciences
  Iowa City, Iowa  United States  52242
• Principal Investigators:

  Rahmatalla, Salam

  Harwood, Casey

• Start Date: 20201215
• Expected Completion Date: 20211225
• Actual Completion Date: 20211231
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers Program
• Source Data: RiP Project 91994-80

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bearing capacity; Bridges; Disaster resilience; Finite element method; Floods; Hydrodynamics; Infrastructure; Inspection; Seismicity
• Subject Areas: Bridges and other structures; Data and Information Technology; Highways; Hydraulics and Hydrology; Maintenance and Preservation; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01777975
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Mid-America Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: 69A3551747107
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Jul 27 2021 4:41PM