Issue 46

F. Stochino et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 46 (2018) 216-225; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.46.20 216 Design of Civil Environmental Engineering Assessment of RC Bridges integrity by means of low-cost investigations Flavio Stochino, Maria Luisa Fadda, Fausto Mistretta Department of Civil Environmental Engineering and Architecture University of Cagliari fstochino@unica.it, http://orcid.org/0000- 0002-0786-9070 mary.fadda@tiscali.it fmistret@unica.it , http://orcid.org/0000- 000 2-5238-7644 A BSTRACT . Infrastructure aging is an important problem nowadays, in particular for countries like Italy in which the main motorways were built 50 years ago. Huge budgets are necessary to keep infrastructure and bridges in service. In addition, the lack of a proper and timely maintenance, entails an increase of the deterioration and therefore higher costs of repair. Thus, the need of methods capable of assessing the reliability of the infrastructure in the frame of Bridge Management System (BMS), is patent. The aim of this work is to provide a robust decision-support tool for the analysis of the data collected with field inspection. The innovative aspect of the proposal is the introduction of two factors which take into account the location of the damage, and the mechanical characterization of the material in the definition of a Condition Rating Number (CRN). The analysis of an existing Reinforced Concrete (RC) bridge network is presented in order to show the accuracy of this new method. K EYWORDS . Bridges; Concrete; BMS; Durability; Inspection; Maintenance. Citation: Stochino, F., Fadda, M.L., Mistretta, F. Assessment of RC Bridges deterioration by means of low-cost investigations, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 46 (2018) 216-225. Received: 27.07.2018 Accepted: 31.08.2018 Published: 01.10.2018 Copyright: © 2018 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. I NTRODUCTION he wear of an asset due to its prolonged use results in a gradual degradation of its performance. The aging of materials and asset technology yields to a decline in technical efficiency or technological obsolescence. Chemical-physical tests have a fundamental role in the inspection and maintenance of installations and machines, see [1-2]. The continuous measurement of these quantities with automatic or semi-automatic methods allows to know the system state and can provide essential information for the policies on condition assessment from the maintenance point of view, see [3]. The same approach should be applied to concrete bridges networks. In fact, as well as industrial machines and equipment should be monitored continuously, also infrastructures require stringent inspections at regular intervals of all the elements. T