Hisao Emoto

Long term application of bus monitoring system to short and medium span bridges and damage detection

In this study, as one solution to the problem for condition assessment of existing short and medium span reinforced/prestressed concrete bridges, a new monitoring method using a public bus as part of a public transit system (bus monitoring system) is proposed, along with safety indices, namely, characteristic deflection, which is relatively free from the influence of dynamic disturbances due to such factors as the roughness of the road surface, and a structural anomaly parameter. A basic study was conducted by using the results of technical verification experiments and numerical analysis simulation. This paper describes the details of not only how to assess the bridge condition by public bus vibration measured in operating on Ube City bus network as a specific example for verify the system but also what kind of consideration we need to apply the system to existing bridges in overseas country.

Practical application of bridge rating expert system to an aged bridge

This paper describes the details of how to predict the remaining service life of an aged RC-T girder bridge and how to make verification of the predicted results based upon a practical bridge management system (J-BMS) which integrated with the concrete bridge rating expert system (BREX) with either visual inspection data and concrete core test results. The authors have been developing the J-BMS that is able to predict the deterioration process of existing bridge members. The remaining service life of the aged RC-T girder bridge (KT bridge) can be quantitatively estimated by applying the BREX system, which is a sub-system of the J-BMS with field inspection data. In this paper, it was found that both the main girder and concrete deck had a remaining service life not exceeding a decade by using the BREX system. Additionally, the influence of the soundness score (safety indices) was shown by selecting the learning (supervised) data. The remaining service life prediction was also verified using the concrete core specimen test.