Objective Condition Assessment of Damaged or Deteriorated Bridges in Ohio

The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) currently maintains an inventory of 14,957 bridges across the state. Of these, by far the largest proportion, 6,335, are steel girder/beam bridges with reinforced concrete decks. In accordance with the National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS), the ODOT Office of Structural Engineering is tasked with the responsibility of rating these structures in order to determine their safe live load carrying capacity. The main objective of this research is to nondestructively field test and evaluate ten (10) damaged/deteriorated, low-rated bridges in order to determine load carrying capacity. All test bridges were selected from the Ohio state inventory in conjunction with input from the ODOT Office of Structural Engineering. A detailed field test plan was developed for each test bridge and included modal testing, truckload testing, and calibrated FE modeling in order to derive accurate, objective load ratings. A secondary objective was to further streamline the field testing and assessment procedures. Specifically, the actual time for a 32-channel modal typical 3-span, 2 lane, 250 foot steel-stringer bridge was reduced to less than one workday for each test. This included test setup and teardown. The benefits of this research to ODOT have been the development of techniques, equipment packages, and a personnel team with the expertise necessary to implement rapid, rigorous, quantitative assessments of critical structures around the state. In addition to these procedures and expertise, deliverables included detailed reports of findings for each of the bridges in the test set.

  • Record URL:
  • Supplemental Notes:
    • Date on cover page is July 2006. Date on title page is December 2005.
  • Corporate Authors:

    University of Cincinnati

    Cincinnati Infrastructure Institute, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences
    P.O. Box 210030
    Cincinnati, OH  United States  45221-0030

    Ohio Department of Transportation

    1980 West Broad Street
    Columbus, OH  United States  43223

    Federal Highway Administration

    1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
    Washington, DC  United States  20590
  • Authors:
    • Helmicki, Arthur J
    • Hunt, Victor J
    • Swanson, James A
  • Publication Date: 2006-7

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Web
  • Features: Appendices; Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 141p

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01155840
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: Report # UC-CII 05/2
  • Contract Numbers: State Job Number 14772(0)
  • Files: TRIS, USDOT, STATEDOT
  • Created Date: Apr 30 2010 12:52PM