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Chapter 6: Case studies
(2023)
The through-life management of our constantly ageing infrastructure is a basic requirement in order to ensure their structural safety and serviceability. Each structure experiences deterioration processes with time leading to a decrease of structural safety and serviceability. The design of new structures considers the expected deterioration for a defined period, the design service life. However, a frequent survey of structural safety controlling structural condition should be mandatory and a maintenance plan should be an integral part of the design. In addition, many structures have exceeded their design service life already or are very close to it leading to an increasing demand for condition assessment. On the one hand, assumptions made during design are not valid any more due to change of the loads, e.g., increasing traffic loads in terms of number and weights. On the other hand, design codes evolved over time in such a way that existing structures do not comply with today’s standards. In all these cases, the through-life management is an important tool to maintain the accessibility of existing structures with known reliability.
In line with the new Model Code for Concrete Structures, which includes guidance for both – design of new structures and assessment of existing structures, the Task Group 3.3 focused on the compilation of a state-of-the-art guideline for the through-life management of existing concrete structures, including:
Data acquisition by testing and monitoring techniques;
Condition assessment for the evaluation of existing structures;
Performance prediction using advanced methods;
Decision-making procedures to perform a complete assessment of existing structure.
The overall objective of the through-life management is the assessment of the current condition and the estimation of the remaining service life under consideration of all boundary conditions.
The ‘Gänstorbrücke’ bridge between the cities of Ulm and Neu-Ulm is one of the best-monitored bridges all over Germany. In addition to an already active bride monitoring system, we have equipped the bridge with 30 ultrasonic transducers to explore the monitoring possibilities at an in-service large-scale reinforced concrete structure with continuous active ultrasonic measurements. The monitoring system is based on the detection of small changes in the entire signal, especially the multiply scattered parts of the recording, the so-called coda. Applying Coda Wave Interferometry (CWI), subtle changes in the signal can be detected and related to changing velocities in the area between source and receiver. A comparison of the results from coda wave interferometry with the strain measurements of the permanent monitoring system shows a correlation between strain measurements and CWI results. We discuss the challenges of changing environmental conditions, pose for interpretation of the results, and highlight the advantages of embedded versus externally attached ultrasonic transducers in permanent bridge monitoring, especially when coda wave interferometry is applied.
Ultrasonic monitoring, making use of the sensitivity of the coda of repeated transmission meas-urements to changes in stress, temperature, moisture, as well as localized or distributed damage, has gotten at-tention in structural health monitoring (SHM) research recently. Analysis methods such as coda wave inter-ferometry (CWI), including its nonlinear extension, have been shown to be able to measure ultrasonic wave velocity changes with a 1∙10-5 resolution, while indicators such as cross-correlation or cross-coherence have been used to distinguish between reversible and irreversible changes. Several small- and large-scale laboratory experiments have demonstrated that stress changes in structures can be captured or damage detected in a very early stage. The use of this technique for pre-warning before failure are currently under investigation, as well as detailed research on the physical causes and the connection between ultrasonic wave properties and materi-al/structural behavior. Recently, several of large-scale laboratory and real structures have been instrumented with embedded ultrasonic transducers to gather experience and evidence on how to use this technology in re-al-world applications. Preliminary results from installations on a new bridge, an existing bridge, a tunnel, a la-boratory earthquake test as well as a historic stadium in Germany, Poland, and the United States, respectively, are presented. Environmental influences (mainly temperature) and validation by load tests are discussed.
NDE 4.0 in Civil Engineering
(2021)
Civil engineering industry is one of the most important industry sectors in the worldwide economy. It contributes significantly to the gross economic product and general employment. Even more important, it provides many of the basic needs of the society (e.g., housing, infrastructure, and protection from natural hazards). The concept of “Industry 4.0” or “Smart Production” has not yet made significant progress in the civil engineering industry. The designing, building, and operating processes are still widely dominated by the exchange of printed documents and drawings. Most objects (buildings and other constructions) are unique, and a large part of the production still requires a large amount of manual labor. As-built documentation and quality assurance are often neglected. Civil engineering is among the industry sectors with the lowest level of digitalization and the lowest gain in productivity. However, this is going to change. In the past decade, several drivers have challenged the ways clients, contractors, and authorities currently operate. These drivers include but are not limited to an increasing demand for serialization and automatization or the mandatory introduction of “Building Information Modeling” (BIM) in public procurement as well as the upcoming use of digital twins. NDE plays an increasing role in quality assurance, condition assessment, and monitoring of structures. However, with very few exceptions, applications are mostly nonstandardized and performed only at selected sites. To change this, the NDT-CE community including manufacturers, service providers, clients, and the scientific community must work consistently on open data formats, interfaces to BIM, standardization, and validated ways for a quantitative use of the results in the assessment of constructions.
"The reassessment of bridges continues to take great importance both nationally and internationally. A major challenge is to find computation models reflecting the actual properties of the considered structures sufficiently accurate. Besides regular inspections, the conduction of advanced measurements is suitable to generate reliable information about a structure to be assessed. Prior to incorporating measurement results in reassessment, the relevance, the trueness, and the precision of the measured information needs to be stated. On the one hand, the use of information whose quality has not been assessed can lead to errors with serious consequences. On the other, the measurement of irrelevant information is inefficient. Although the use of measured data in assessment is currently mostly unregulated, their appreciation in reliability analyses is beneficial since the built environment can be assessed more realistically. Utilizing NDT in reassessment has the potential to extend remaining lifetimes of a structure, save resources, and improve infrastructural availabilities. The power of judgment regarding the decision on the reliability of an existing structure can be increased.
In this contribution, an approach is outlined to process non-destructively gathered measurement data in a comparableway in order to include themeasured information in probabilistic reliability assessments of existing structures. An essential part is the calculation of measurement uncertainties. The effect of incorporating evaluated NDT-results is demonstrated by means of a prestressed concrete bridge and GPR measurements conducted on this bridge as a case-study. The bridge is assessed regarding SLS Decompression using the NDT-results."
Due to the importance of reinforced concrete structures for modern society, damage assessment during the entire life-cycle of such structures has become a special interest in non-destructive testing. Using embedded ultrasound sensors in combination with other measurement methods, numerical modeling and self-made data collectors, tailored specifically for monitoring tasks, the German research group DFG FOR CoDA aims to investigate and develop novel methods for damage detection and rapid model updating in reinforced concrete structures. In the first stage of the project, besides the development of custom-built, low-cost data collectors, ultrasonic transducers are embedded in a large, reinforced concrete specimen on a BAM test site near Berlin. In this experiment, the influence of changing environmental conditions (mainly temperature) on the ultrasound signal is investigated using coda-wave interferometry. The results show a correlation between changes in temperature and ultrasonic velocity. Such changes must be taken into consideration in a long-term monitoring setup to distinguish between reversible and permanent changes. By correcting the data using a linear relation between concrete temperature and velocity change to remove the seasonal trends and by low-pass filtering the data to remove daily variations can remove most of the temperature influence on the ultrasound measurements.
The purpose of this contribution is to introduce and to apply the developed approach of incorporating non-destructively gathered measurement results (instead of deterministic information and assumptions) into a reassessment model of a typical prestressed concrete road bridge and to outline the advantages. An essential part is the quality evaluation of the non-destructively measured information, that deals primarily with two questions. Could the object or parameter to be obtained reliably detected and if, how accurate are the inspection results achieved? Therefore, the importance of the combination of a probability of detection (POD)-approach and measurement uncertainty calculations is emphasized. With regard to the introduced case-study it is shown, for which structure parameters an assumption deviating from the actual (and measurable) situation has a particularly strong (and possibly arithmetically unfavorable) influence on the structural reliability. Measurements on such parameters are particularly beneficial for a reliable and robust reassessment. In conclusion, the individual reassessment results without consideration and with consideration of evaluated non-destructive inspection results are compared.
Although concrete itself is not a combustible material, concrete mixtures with high density, such has high-performance concretes (HPCs), are susceptible to significant damage during fires due to explosive spalling. Past research has shown that the inclusion ofpolymer fibres in high density concrete can significantly mitigate this fire damage. The exact mechanisms causing this increased spalling resistance are not yet fully understood, but it is thought that the fibres facilitate moisture transport during fire exposure, which in turn contributes to relief of internal stresses in the spalling-susceptible region. In this study, X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) was applied to observe the interaction between polymer fibres and cracking during thermal exposure. For this purpose, two concrete samples containing different polymer fibre types were subjected to incremental application of a defined thermal exposure. CT images were acquired before and after each thermal exposure and powerful image processing tools were used to segment the various material components. This enabled a detailed analysis of crack formation and propagation as well as the visualization and quantification of polymer fibre characteristics within the concrete. The results demonstrated that the orientation of both fibres and cracks in polymerfibre reinforced concrete tend to be anisotropic. The results also indicated that crack geometry characteristics may be correlated with fibre orientation, with cracks tending to run parallel to fibre beds. Clear quantitative relationships were also observed between heating and increasing cracking levels, expressed in terms of both crack surface area and crack volume.
The ever more ambitious strategic goals of meeting the requirements in ensuring technical safety and security of civil structures have resulted in flourishing development of innovative structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies for early damage diagnosis and prognosis. At the same time, implementing SHM systems provides tangible economic benefits derived from lower life-cycle costs associated with reduction in the maintenance, repair and insurance expenses. Due to the large size and harsh environmental conditions common to most civil structures, the broad range of favorable physical-mechanical properties of POFs allow for customized monitoring solutions for a wide variety of applications.
In addition to common SHM-related advantages of optical fibers including their electromagnetic immunity, small size, lightweight as well as spark-free and non-conductive characteristics, POFs offer better bending and fracture resistance then their glass-counterparts. Particularly, the improved robustness of POFs, their ease of handling, low Young’s Modulus and high elastic limit of 10% compared to 1% in silica glass [1] are relevant to practical applications. Depending on the composition, dopants, drawing process and geometry [2], strain measurement up to 45% [3] or even above 100% [4,5] has been demonstrated with standard POFs. Therefore, the dominant market expected for POF sensors includes monitoring of high-strain-rate deformations in earthwork structures, crack detection in concrete and masonry structures [6] or overstressing in high-rise steel structures exposed to moisture, corrosion, leakage, fatigue, vibration, fire, overflow, earthquake and intentional damage. For fracture monitoring within concrete structures, the sensory usage of POFs becomes especially favorable since the extremely alkaline environment of concrete mixtures is well known to be corrosive to standard silica glass optical fibers (GOFs) [1,7].
Most of advanced distributed sensing techniques are commonly based on Rayleigh backscatter reflectometry using commercially available multimode (MM) POFs. Such typical MM POFs range from a step-index (SI) poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) POF having a core diameter of 1 mm to a low-loss graded-index (GI) perfluorinated (PF) POF based on poly(perfluorobutenyl-vinylether) also known as CYTOP [8] with a 50 µm core diameter. The relatively low optical attenuation value of 30 dB/km at 1.3 µm [9,10] makes PFGI POFs also interesting for distributed Brillouin sensing [11-14]. Compared to GOFs, PFGI POFs offer better potential for temperature measurement and have comparably low theoretical attenuation limit [15]. Therefore, POF-based distributed Brillouin sensing is expected to play an important role in the future of SHM, especially at high-strain ranges. The significance of the Brillouin measurment technique can be also enhanced by further development of the single-mode (SM) POFs which are still subject of research and are used for coherent detection techniques [6]. Furthermore, SM PMMA POFs have been characterized in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer setup for strain values up to 15.8% [16,17].
The current development of SM perfluorinated and microstructured POFs (mPOFs) represents an immense promise for quasi-distributed dynamic measurement at high strain levels based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technology. While SM mPOFs with optical losses of about 1 dB/m can be fabricated [6], the SM PF POFs presented by Zhou et al. feature low attenuation of even less than 0.2 dB/m in the wavelength range of 1.41 µm to 1.55 µm [18]. At the same time, the SM PF POFs have the potential for improved thermal stability compared to their PMMA counterparts [19].
This whole chapter provides a comprehensive overview on current POF-based sensing principles and SHM technologies, highlighting their diverse applications in civil engineering structures. In the application-related context, close attention is paid to the development of smart sensor-based geotextiles and geogrids. Such geosynthetics-integrated distributed POF sensors have proven to be a promising solution for two- or even tree-dimensional monitoring of critical high mechanical deformations in both geotechnical and masonry structures. Moreover, geosynthetics in the form of nonwoven geotextiles as well as polymer-based geogrids used as carrier materials for POF sensors enable optimized load transfer from the monitored structure to the measuring fiber without losing their original functionality. In other words, smart geosynthetics provide a cost-efficient dual solution for, on the one hand, well-established increase of structure stability and decrease of erosion effects, on the other hand, early-warning and detection capabilities in the prevention and elimination of potential hazards and lasting damages.