Requisitos, indicadores y valores umbrales para la monitorización de puentes de carretera

Abstract

Engineering systems must be planned, designed, implemented, operated and maintained to ensure an economical operation throughout its service life in compliance with given requirements. In the case of bridges, these requirements could be related with structural safety or serviceability. These given requirements must be fulfilled with an appropriate reliability level depending on different relevant parameters, among others, the reference period considered and possible consequences of non-compliance or failure. Different influences could be in the origin of not complying with a given requirement, such as deviation from admitted values for actions or environmental influences, geotechnical actions, dynamic effects, reduction of resistance due to deterioration mechanisms or excessive loads or reduction of resistance due to accidental actions. Quantifying these influences or indicators could provide valuable information of the capacity of the structure to comply with some of the predefined requirements. In general indicators could be related to different system parameters, such as geometry, materials, actions and structural behaviour. For an effective surveillance, the variability of the parameters selected for the inspection should have a high influence in the reliability of the system considered. Therefore, the selection of indicators should depend on the engineering system, its function and performance, exposure conditions, its materials and the available data acquisition systems. The strategy of inspection planning based on suitable indicators allows adapting the inspection efforts to the condition of the component of the system and for prioritising in accordance with the importance of the individual components and the different deterioration mechanisms. In that sense, indicator based inspection is considered as a risk reduction measure. In this work several indicators are proposed that could be used within the framework of road bridge inspection together with its corresponding threshold values and the average frequency for exceedance of such values. Finally a practical application is shown for the developed criteria to a road bridge case with an unknown reliability level.