Anna M. Rakoczy, the Curtis Visiting Professor at the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering, presented a seminar on remote inspection and monitoring technologies and their application in steel bridges as part of the Structures Graduate Seminar Series on Tuesday, April 7.

Abstract

Recent scientific and technological advancements have enabled a more efficient structural condition assessment of bridges, mainly through the implementation of intelligent inspection strategies. These intelligent strategies can provide early identification of critically damaged components before failure and will therefore play a key role in extending the life of infrastructure. The latest inspection technologies can provide inspection plans with damage conditions, create a damage report as well as provide statistics and comparisons to the previous inspection findings.

The new and existing inspection technologies are directed to help with the digitalization of the Bridge Management System (BMS). The complexity of maintenance/inspection requires organized, automated, open, and transparent digital processes, which should consider both - structure and asset management data. Further, the inspection/monitoring findings serve as a source for decision-making models. The digitalized aspects of autonomous inspection provide better performance prediction models and guarantee safety for the users.

Based on remote measurement of the bridge discrepancies between the documentation and the as-is structure can be found during surveying that were not observed otherwise. To detect very early signs of deterioration and prevent the failure of critical components the information received from the inspection needs to be further evaluated. The global and local FEA can be performed to identify the effect of the significant deviation in the actual geometry of the measured connection and the design documentation.

Biographical Sketch

Anna M. Rakoczy is currently a Curtis Visiting Professor at the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Purdue University. She is also an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Roads and Bridges at the Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. She has 15 years of research and academic experience in the field of bridge engineering. Her research focuses on extending the service life of bridge structures using reliability criteria. Dr. Rakoczy was a Vice-chair of IABSE task Group 5.9 on Remote Bridge Inspection from 2021 to 2025 and currently continues her involvement as a member. She is currently a Vice-chair of IABSE Commission 5 on Existing Structures.