Service Life Assessment of Existing Highway Bridges with No Planned Regular Inspections
Publication: Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 22, Issue 2
Abstract
Safety of a highway infrastructure system depends very much on the proper maintenance of bridges. The level of required maintenance is, typically, determined through a series of regular field inspections with the guidance of safety–economy trade-off. In Turkey, bridge maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation are currently performed on an as-needed basis. Time-dependent reliability analysis cannot be utilized for Turkish bridges for the time being since the majority of the bridges are either not regularly inspected or not inspected at all. The purpose of this paper is to propose a simple method to assess the remaining service life of a bridge by defining a relationship between its current condition rating and its age by evaluating a set of bridges at different ages. In a case study, 28 bridges were inspected for the first time to assess the average life expectancy. The average life of a bridge was predicted to be , and for this set of bridges, the main body components were found to deteriorate more than earth retaining and serviceability components.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank Mr. Orhan Yıldırım of the Turkish General Directorate of Highways for his support. It is with pleasure that the writers extend their thanks to Aysu Berk who renovated the current bridge inspection methodology in Turkey. The financial support of ODTU for the field studies is appreciated.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
Volume 22 • Issue 2 • April 2008
Pages: 108 - 114
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 21, 2006
Accepted: Jul 19, 2007
Published online: Apr 1, 2008
Published in print: Apr 2008
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