Damage Identification of Continuous Rigid Frame Concrete Bridge

Abstract

During a bridge service life, many factors can cause damage accumulation such as overloaded traffic, fatigue effect, and so on. Hence, the identification of potential damages has been received wide attention to prevent such sudden fatal accident. An experiment of a continuous rigid frame concrete bridge, which had 3 spans and a total length of 18 meters, was presented in this paper. Two load stages and ten different load steps were simulated to test various scenario of long-term loading and different levels of overload. Curvature mode method was adopted to detect the damage during the exercises. The changes of curvature modes were used to detect damage after the ten load steps. This method performed excellent to identify the damage position of the bridge. So, it is concluded that the curvature modes can be used to detect damage in actual structures. In addition, the Finite-Element Analysis (FEA) was utilized, and the experimental recurring was verified positively through FEA model.