Improved operational safety of natural resources infrastructure by structural health monitoring.

Service loads, environmental and accidental actions, natural hazards such as earthquakes and tropical cyclones may cause damage to civil engineering infrastructures. In developed countries, a civil engineering project often has a built-in structural health monitoring system in the construction stage to ensure operational safety and to possibly reduce the cost related to life cycle management (e.g. for bridges, the annual costs of repair are estimated at 1.5% of their value). A proper monitoring strategy will help to avoid or at least minimize a long out-of-service time, which represents an even higher economic cost (e.g. traffic delay due to major bridge repair, unscheduled shutdown of a power reactor, etc.). This project therefore specifically aims at providing an efficient but low-cost methodology that can be applied to early detect structural damage either by permanent monitoring or periodic monitoring. KU Leuven will help UTC to develop a suitable structural health monitoring by using vibration based field testing in Vietnamese conditions. Field tests of two pilot bridges and training workshops are planned.

Keywords:Structural Health Monitoring, Damage detection, Vibrations, Infrastructure condition

Disciplines:Economic development, innovation, technological change and growth