Project description
News ways to assess retrofitting of existing bridges
First developed for the aerospace industry, fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composites have proven beneficial in bridge engineering. They have replaced traditional materials for structural elements like girders, bridge decks and stay cables but there are factors that may reduce the level of integration of the FRP system with the bridge. The EU-funded BriFace project will apply structural health monitoring techniques to measure the efficiency of the strengthening measure and quantify these with interface efficiency indices (InterFeis). The project will define the indices. A first in bridge inspection, a long-distant inspection method of guided waves will be used. The findings will be useful for developing bridge design guidelines and an EU strategy on infrastructure safety..
Objective
Modernisation of our deficient transportation networks and in particular bridges is a pressing requirement imposed by the growing EU economy, vital to societal coherence and safety. Frequent retrofitting solutions include the use of versatile Fiber Reinforced Polymers systems (FRPs), which have been proven to enhance the capacity and deflections of bridges. Nevertheless, it is surprising that only a few, if any, research results are available with regard to the efficiency and appropriateness of FRP systems used on bridge retrofitting schemes, whilst international design guidelines neglect the level of integration of the measures with the existing bridge components. In practice, and especially in bridge decks were deterioration is expected, there is a number of limitations that reduce the level of integration of the FRP system with the bridge. This gave the BriFace project a strong motivation to utilise Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques to assess the efficiency of the strengthening measure and quantify those, for the first time in the international literature, with the Interface Efficiency Indices (InterFeis), by measuring reliably the interface deflections and strains and by taking into account the failure modes and the limit stress states of bridge components. The novel objectives of BriFace are: 1) To define the Interface Efficiency Indices, 2) To utilize an expedient, long-distant inspection method of guided waves for the first time in bridge inspection, 3) To increase the interface efficiency by chemical means potentially by using nanoparticles and 4) To use InterFeis as a reliable indicator toward the quantification of the redundancy of the retrofitted bridge, as a means to assess its capacity and thus its resilience. The research outcomes will also benefit stakeholders and fuel bridge design guidelines and align them with the EU strategy on infrastructural safety and resilience.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringfibers
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringstructural engineeringstructural health monitoring
- natural scienceschemical sciencespolymer sciences
- engineering and technologynanotechnologynano-materials
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
GU2 7XH Guildford
United Kingdom