Lebensdauer alter stählerner Bauwerke

Life cycle prediction of steel structures.

The reinvestments into the civil engineering buildings in Germany can be substantially lowered by an extension of their service life. This paper gives an overview of methods which were developed by the Collaborative-Research-Center SFB 477 "Life cycle assessment of structures via innovative monitoring" at the Technischen Universität Braunschweig. The main topic is the lifetime assessment of old steel buildings by monitoring, followed by an overview of different methods to determine the inherent damage in the structure. The reliable determination of weak points in the building is described and the correct choice of the monitoring strategy for a weak detail is explained. A procedure is presented to determine the life expectancy of fatigue-stressed buildings by monitoring and further attempts. The article is closed by a section over the flaw detection at buildings by using piezo arrays.