Common practices in assessing conditions of concrete bridges

Abstract

Bridge condition assessment is an essential step in bridge management. To ensure safety and serviceability of bridge infrastructure, accurate condition assessment is needed to provide basis for bridge Maintenance, Repair, and Replacement (MRR) decisions. In Canada and the United States, visual inspection is the common practice to evaluate a bridge condition. Meanwhile, this practice is limited to detect surface defects and external flaws. For subsurface defects, Non-Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT&E) technologies are being used to supplement visual inspection. This paper reviews the common practices in assessing concrete bridges' conditions and discusses the limitations of available condition assessment models. Further, this research studies six NDT&E techniques and establishes a set of selection criteria which is utilized to compare each technique in terms of providing the best inspection results. Based on the comparison, it is found that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) appears to be the most appropriate NDT&E techniques for inspection of concrete bridges. Thus, this paper recommends integrating GPR technology with the dominant visual inspection practice in order to establish a more accurate overall bridge condition rating system where surface and subsurface defects are assessed.