Monitoring and Safety Evaluation of Existing Concrete Structures

Book excerpt: The condition assessment of aged structures is becoming a more and more important issue for civil infrastructure management systems. The continued use of existing systems is, due to environmental, economical and socio-political assets, of great significance and is growing larger every year. Thus the extent of necessary repair of damaged reinforced concrete structures is of major concern in most countries today. Monitoring techniques may have a decisive input to limit expenditures for maintenance and repair of existing structures. Modern test and measurement methods as well as computational mechanics open the door for a wide variety of monitoring applications. The need for quantitative and qualitative knowledge has led to the development and improvement of surveillance techniques, which have already found successful application in other disciplines such as medicine, physics and chemistry. The design of experimental test and measurement systems is inherently an interdisciplinary activity. The specification of the instrumentation to measure the structural response will involve the skills of civil, electrical and computer engineers. The main aim of fib Commission 5, Structural servicer life aspects, is to provide a rational procedure to obtain an optimal technical-economic performance of concrete structures in service and to ensure a feedback of experience gained to design, execution, maintenance and rehabilitation. Against this background fib Task Group 5.1 Monitoring and Safety Evaluation of Existing Concrete Structures had been established to evaluate the existing practice worldwide. The objective of this state-of-art report is to summarize the most important inspection and measuring methods, to describe the working process and to evaluate the applicability to structural monitoring. Particular emphasis is placed upon non-destructive systems, lifetime monitoring, data evaluation and safety aspects.