Grant: Alliance Grants

A large portion of the bridge inventory in Canada has either passed or is approaching its end of service life. Such bridges are at high risk of collapse especially in regions prone to extreme natural events, which are becoming more frequent in large part due to the influence of climate change. Abandoning the bridge (total or partial closure with restricted access) will significantly affect the operation of a region. Replacing deficient bridges with new structures would require substantial investment and also impose significant carbon emission. Hence, retrofitting would be the safer method of mitigating risks. The limited financial resources coupled with the continuous drastic increase of deficient bridges in Canada calls for bold actions which can only be achieved through systematic, well-designed, and implementable research. The proposed academic-industrial collaboration addresses the above challenges through two tracks. The first one focuses on developing a systematic procedure that uses performance-based principles to identify and prioritize bridges that need to be evaluated for seismic retrofitting. The second track focuses on introducing innovative cost-effective bridge retrofit and repair measures and the development of performance-based design guidelines by integrating lifecycle and lifecycle cost analysis. The first phase of this project will deal with the inventory of all publicly owned bridges. Based on the data in the database, detailed evaluations of the bridge conditions will be performed using performance-based assessment. In the next phase, the prospect of innovative bridge retrofitting/repairing measures will be evaluated by a combination of experimental programs and extensive numerical simulations. Integrated lifecycle cost and performance-based design guidelines will be developed to ensure that the proposed novel measures are implementable in practice. The research team will work closely with the design code committee to formulate the appropriate framework with which the proposed design recommendations and guidelines can be incorporated into the design codes.