Study of failure profiles in the bridge structures

Abstract

Bridge safety is an indispensable part of transportation safety. However, each bridge is unique with respect to its material, design and the environment which it is located in, and other relevant factors. This makes defining a unified framework for studying and categorizing failures in the bridges a difficult task. The current report aims at taking the first step to reach such a goal. This report addresses the issue of the bridge failure. First, it introduces different bridge characteristics. The emphasis is on introducing different types of bridges including differences in the design, material, structure forms, load type, condition and environment. In the second part, the report focuses on failure profile for the bridge structures. This includes discussing different failure causes, failure mechanism, and their corresponding modes and types. Finally, the findings from the first two parts are applied in a sample case study. The data is from BRUTUS, the database of Norwegian Public Roads Administration (SVV). This data includes the information of the 152 bridge structures located in Trondheim municipality. The data provides information on the bridge characteristics e.g. material type, bridge design, application and age. The bridges in Trondheim are categorized based on the characteristics and their failure status are investigated based on the risk matrices.