Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Although Canadians own a huge inventory of existing infrastructure, very little guidance is available to engineers designing its rehabilitation. The proposed research program will (1) develop, and validate by physical testing, design methodology for concrete highway bridge rehabilitation, (2) support development of a landmark new American Concrete Institute Committee 562 Standard for evaluation and rehabilitation of concrete structures, and (3) determine, using numerical modeling and full-scale experimental investigation at a new CFI-funded laboratory, the load paths in typical wood-frame houses to develop evidence-based code criteria for improving the robustness of houses subjected to extreme winds. The bridge rehabilitation work will include analytical methods, validated by experimental studies, for two difficult issues routinely encountered in practice: the impact of restrained shrinkage in new concrete that is cast against existing concrete and the mechanics of concrete members with reinforcement that is temporarily exposed, and so unbonded, during the rehabilitation. The research for the ACI Standard will derive load combinations to check the safety of concrete structures during and after rehabilitation based on the consequence of failure of the component being rehabilitated. The experimental investigation of wood-frame housing will take place at the Insurance Research Lab for Better Homes, a new $7 M laboratory capable of subjecting full-scale houses to the temporally and spatially varying loads of an extreme wind storm. Load cells within and beneath the test house specimen will capture the load paths within the structure, investigate how they change as damage occurs, and validate analytical predictions obtained using finite element software. Rehabilitation procedures can then be developed based on a clear understanding of how the house responds to load. The funds requested will train 6 PhD and 3 MESc students to become the next generation of stewards of Canada's infrastructure.