Applying Field Inspection Technologies for the Investigation of Pre-stressed Concrete Box Girder Bridges

Applying Field Inspection Technologies for the Investigation of Pre-stressed Concrete Box Girder Bridges

The pre-stressed concrete box girder is a commonly used bridge superstructure in highway, urban, and railway road systems. Due to the importance of bridge structures, management authorities have recently placed increasing attention on the maintenance and monitoring of the structural safety of these structures. However, many unavoidable factors might cause the reduction of the pre-stress in the box girder and thus threaten the safety of bridge structures. Furthermore, long-term exposure to the natural environment will also cause the structural components of the bridge to degrade. To ensure the bridge functions as intended, the proper maintenance of structural components is required, with necessary detection and investigation methods taken for bridge elements that have been observed to have significant deterioration or damage. In this study, a bridge is taken as an example to illustrate the application of technologies for the field investigation of pre-stressed concrete box girder bridges. The primary purpose of the investigation is to provide feedback on the current bearing capacity of the bridge and to formulate the analysis parameters of the corresponding reinforcement improvement plan.