Rapid Calibration of a Damaged Bridge Undergoing Rehabilitation

Redistribution of stresses can be difficult to predict following damage in bridge structures. Such uncertainty is particularly important for designing, monitoring and decision making in relation to repair works. When continuous monitoring is deemed feasible on a damaged bridge, on-site rapid calibrations can be of significant importance in addressing these uncertainties and help in the decision making process. This paper presents a full scale example of a bridge structure damaged by impact loading and subsequently repaired in the presence of a monitoring sensor network. A site- based, rapid calibration of the damaged and undamaged beams in the bridge is presented based on full-scale experimentation and the relationship between the calibrations between the damaged and undamaged beams are investigated.