This paper focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a supplementary bridge damage quantification tool. For this study, a glued-laminated timber arch bridge in South Dakota was selected, and an UAV was utilized for the bridge damage quantification. A recommended four-stage UAV-enabled bridge damage quantification protocol involving image quality assessment and image-based damage quantification was developed...
The field of Civil Engineering has lately gained increasing interest in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), commonly referred to as drones. Due to an increase of deteriorating bridges according to the report released by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), a more efficient and cost-effective alternative for bridge inspection is required. The goal of this paper was to analyze the effectiveness of drones as supplemental bridge inspection tools. In pursuit of this goal, the selected bridge for inspection was a three-span gluedlaminated timber girder with a composite concrete deck located near the city of Keystone in the state of South Dakota (SD)...
An innovative concept for a modular timber concrete composite system for short span highway bridges has been designed and key components experimentally validated. The proposed system consists of a Ultra-High Performance Fibre Reinforced Concrete(UHPFRC) deck and glue-laminated timer (glulam) girders linked to act compositely together by reinforcing steel bar shear connectors. This composite system has light, stable modules that can be rapidly constructed on site with less special equipment. Simple design checks indicate that the concept satisfies all serviceability limit state(SLS) and ultimate limit state(ULS) requirements of the Canadian Highway Bridge Design Code. Pull-out tests characterized the embedment lengths of 20M steel bar connectors to be 10 bar-diameters in UHPFRC. Push-off tests determined the embedment lengths of the same bars to be 30 bar-diameters glued into the timber girders. The slip modulus of the connectors is determined to be 67 kN/mm. The stiffness of the crosswise self-tapping screw connectors were tested and found to be structurally insignificant in this application. The excellent tensile and cracking properties of the reinforced UHPFRC deck was experimentally verified. A small amount of reinforcement would further improve the ductility of the UPHFRC deck system.
