Ermittlung von Modellunsicherheiten bei Stahlbetonstrukturen

Novel monitoring techniques for abutment free bridge structures

In structural bridge engineering, maintenance strategies and thus budgetary demands are highly influenced by construction type and quality of design. Nowadays bridge owners and planners tend to include life-cycle cost analyses in their decision processes regarding the overall design trying to optimize structural reliability and durability within financial constraints. However, efforts to reduce maintenance costs over the expected lifetime by adopting well established design principles lead to unknown risks concerning for instance boundary conditions. Smart permanent and short term monitoring concepts can reduce the associated risk of new design concepts by observing the performance of structural components during prescribed time periods. The objectives of this article are the discussion of concepts for (a) the effective incorporation of monitoring data in model updating procedures by means of the influence line and the model correct factor concept, (b) the investigation of the functionality of monitoring systems including error tracking, and (c) the inverse identification and evaluation of sensor properties and monitoring values. The proposed methodology will be applied to an integrative monitoring system applied on an existing three-span joint less bridge structure.