Redundancy and Operational Safety of Composite Stringer Bridges with Deteriorated Girders

AbstractAs a critical component of the national transportation network, bridges have received a lot of attention regarding their safety and condition state. Bridge superstructures begin to degrade after they are placed in service; to combat this issue, owners have begun to utilize a variety of technologies to monitor the behavior and detect different sources of damage in these structures and generate higher fidelity condition metrics. However, an appropriate maintenance decision-making process requires knowledge of the influence of detected damage and deterioration mechanisms on the overall system behavior. This paper presents a performance measurement and evaluation framework that can be used to characterize the impact of deteriorating conditions on the performance of in-service bridge superstructures. The framework was established based on a numerical modeling approach and was validated through a sensitivity analysis of two representative in-service composite steel girder bridges under the impact of cor...