Citation

Champion C. APWA Reporter 2002; 69(8): 11-12.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, American Public Works Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Over 70 percent of the bridges in Australia are timber bridges, which over time have become inadequate in terms of load capacity. Damage to the strength and stiffness of these bridges cannot be measured by even the skilled the eye, hence the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia (IPWEA) began a research in 1999/2000 and discovered a low- cost procedure, which measures "the free vibration response generated by an instrumented hammer." A benefit of this procedure is that there is no need to fully load the bridge in order to imitate design loads and possibly damage the bridge in the process, also, there is no need to measure deformations under full loads as static load tests require. Not only did this method require much less time and resources as conventional load testing, but it created minimal disturbances to traffic. Pushing the project into an applied research phase will bring forth the possibility of testing bridges over time, recording their deterioration and estimating intervention levels. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2002 in hopes of procuring data on deterioration by creating computer models, which will be available for use by bridge managers and technical staff.