Abstract:
“Inspection and Assessment of bridges’' plays an important role, because the
resources being spent in keeping existing bridges functioning to the standards for
which they were designed are no longer sufficient. There is serious risk of reducing
the investment necessary for rebuilding these structures. Since maintenance budgets
are always limited, this involves setting priorities and defining maintenance strategies
based on real condition of each bridge determined by periodic and proper inspection
and assessment.
In Sri Lanka we can see several types of bridges. Some of them are more than
hundred years old. To decide whether the bridges need to be demolished or used for
next few years, proper inspection methods and assessment techniques are needed.
Based on the results maintenance can be carried out effectively. Not only for old
bridges but new coming bridges also have to be inspected and evaluated on a regular
basis and should be maintained to reduce the major repair cost.
Current methods of inspection performed by Road Development Authority
(RDA) of Sri Lanka are only visual inspection and it depends only on the personnel
and it leads to some misjudgment.
So, this research is made to improve the existing manual inspection method,
with guideline and manual and propose new assessment method.
The improvements on the newly developed manual inspection method consists
new inspection sheets for condition inspection of concrete and steel bridges and
guideline and manual for the manual inspection. This is basically an independent
inspection method while comparing the existing method.
The new assessment method for the condition assessment technique deals with
equations to assess the component of bridges and main part of the bridges separately
and overall assessment of the bridges. For the strength assessment of concrete deck
slab “YIELD” software is validated. As there is no guideline for the assessment of
bridges, assessment guideline also discussed.
It is also recommended to carry on some additional work along the lines of
present study.
