Proposed Method for Determining the Interval for Hands-on Inspection of Steel Bridges with Fracture Critical Members

The proposed assessment procedure presented in this paper may be used to establish inspection intervals for steel bridges with fracture critical members (FCMs) (if adopted by the Federal Highway Administration). The procedure proposed herein only applies to FCM inspections which are defined as follows: a hands-on inspection of a FCM or member components that may include visual and other nondestructive evaluations. The method is rather simple and provides an alternative procedure to the pure calendar based inspection methodology currently specified in the Code of Federal Regulations for all FCMs. There are only two requirements which must first be satisfied in order to use the assessment. The first is that the routine 24-month inspection must continue to be performed on the bridge under evaluation. The second is that a FCM inspection must be performed on the bridge or the FCM under evaluation prior to the implementation of the resulting inspection intervals given from this assessment. The “initial inspection” should be performed as a typical FCM inspection. The assessment procedure is intended to be applied to individual FCMs and not the entire bridge itself. However, on bridges with multiple FCMs, the “worst case” FCM may be evaluated using the assessment and the resulting inspection interval may be applied to all FCMs on the bridge (for simplicity and bookkeeping purposes). The decision of whether to apply the assessment to all FCMs or the bridge’s worst case FCM is left up to the owner or engineer. The approach is not based on more rigorous damage tolerant design concepts or other fracture mechanics based methods. Nevertheless, the method is a first step in providing a more rational alternative to calendar based inspection and allows owners to prioritize structures and resource allocation. Using engineering experience and judgment, the interval for the hands-on inspection of steel bridges with FCMs can then be selected based on upper limits established through a consensus. Although the focus is on fracture critical bridges and members, the writers believe that the concept could be extended to a variety of structure types and configurations.