Reliability-Based Service-Life Assessment of Aging Bridges

A special issue of Infrastructures (ISSN 2412-3811).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2021) | Viewed by 6194

Special Issue Editors

School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia
Interests: structural reliability; community resilience; natural hazards modelling; reliability and resilience-based design
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Guest Editor
Department of Bridge Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
Interests: bridge aero- and hydro-dynamics; structural safety and reliability under multiple hazards; fluid-structure-interaction (FSI); engineering optimization

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The normal serviceability of bridges plays an essential role in physically supporting a traffic system’s functionality. Many bridges are exposed to severe environmental or operational conditions during their service life, which may trigger the reduction of structural performance and remaining service-life below expected. Structurally or functionally deficient bridges may further lead to catastrophic economic or social losses for the surrounding community. These consequences, unfortunately, are extremely challenging or even impossible to predict exactly due to the uncertainties arising from both the structural properties and the external load conditions. Motivated by the costly disposition of the degraded bridges, as well as the severe failure-induced consequences, it is necessary to assess the bridge’s capacity to fulfill the safety requirements during the considered reference period under a probability-based framework, with which the decision-makers can optimize the maintenance or enhancement strategies accordingly.

Notwithstanding the remarkable progress of recent research, the engineering practice calls for further efforts to better manage the safety and serviceability level of deteriorating bridges with advanced methods and techniques. This Special Issue provides a platform for key researchers in the field of bridge engineering to present their latest research outputs. Contributions addressing the reliability-based safety and service-life assessment of aging bridges, both theoretical and experimental, are welcome.

Dr. Cao Wang
Prof. Dr. Guoji Xu
Dr. Zhenhao Zhang
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • reliability and durability
  • risk-informed optimization
  • life-cycle cost analysis
  • service life prediction
  • health monitoring systems
  • construction materials

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 2278 KiB  
Article
A Hybrid Surrogate Model for the Prediction of Solitary Wave Forces on the Coastal Bridge Decks
by Jinsheng Wang, Shihao Xue and Guoji Xu
Infrastructures 2021, 6(12), 170; https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120170 - 1 Dec 2021
Cited by 15 | Viewed by 2591
Abstract
To facilitate the establishment of the probabilistic model for quantifying the vulnerability of coastal bridges to natural hazards and support the associated risk assessment and mitigation activities, it is imperative to develop an accurate and efficient method for wave forces prediction. With the [...] Read more.
To facilitate the establishment of the probabilistic model for quantifying the vulnerability of coastal bridges to natural hazards and support the associated risk assessment and mitigation activities, it is imperative to develop an accurate and efficient method for wave forces prediction. With the fast development of computer science, surrogate modeling techniques have been commonly used as an effective alternative to computational fluid dynamics for the establishment of a predictive model in coastal engineering. In this paper, a hybrid surrogate model is proposed for the efficient and accurate prediction of the solitary wave forces acting on coastal bridge decks. The underlying idea of the proposed method is to enhance the prediction capability of the constructed model by introducing an additional surrogate to correct the errors made by the main predictor. Specifically, the regression-type polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) is employed as the main predictor to capture the global feature of the computational model, whereas the interpolation-type Kriging is adopted to learn the local variations of the prediction error from the PCE. An engineering case is employed to validate the effectiveness of the hybrid model, and it is observed that the prediction performance (in terms of residual mean square error and correlation coefficient) of the hybrid model is superior to the optimal PCE and artificial neural network (ANN) for both horizontal and vertical wave forces, albeit the maximum PCE degrees used in the hybrid model are lower than the optimal degrees identified in the pure PCE model. Moreover, the proposed hybrid model also enables the extraction of explicit predictive equations for the parameters of interest. It is expected that the hybrid model could be extended to more complex wave conditions and structural shapes to facilitate the life-cycle structural design and analysis of coastal bridges. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reliability-Based Service-Life Assessment of Aging Bridges)
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16 pages, 1390 KiB  
Article
Explicitly Assessing the Durability of RC Structures Considering Spatial Variability and Correlation
by Cao Wang
Infrastructures 2021, 6(11), 156; https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6110156 - 3 Nov 2021
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2587
Abstract
The durability design of reinforced concrete (RC) structures that are exposed to aggressive environmental attacks (e.g., corrosion due to chloride ingress in marine environment) plays a vital role in ensuring the structural serviceability within a reference period of interest. Existing approaches for the [...] Read more.
The durability design of reinforced concrete (RC) structures that are exposed to aggressive environmental attacks (e.g., corrosion due to chloride ingress in marine environment) plays a vital role in ensuring the structural serviceability within a reference period of interest. Existing approaches for the durability design and assessment of RC structures have, for the most part, not considered the spatial distribution of corrosion-related structural properties. In this paper, a closed-form approach is developed for durability assessment of RC structures, where the structural dimension, spatial variability, and correlation of structural properties such as the concrete cover thickness and the chloride diffusion coefficient are taken into account. The corrosion and crack initiations of an emerged tube tunnel segment that was used in the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge project were assessed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The accuracy of the method was verified through a comparison with Monte Carlo simulation results based on two-dimensional random field modeling. The proposed method can be used to efficiently assess the durability performance of RC structures in the marine environment and has the potential to become an efficient tool to guide the durability design of RC structures subjected to corrosion. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Reliability-Based Service-Life Assessment of Aging Bridges)
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