Presented by Dr John Moore, University of New England (UNE)Wednesday 2nd April, 2014.
There are many thousands of timber bridges in-service in Australia on local roads and serviced by local councils. Many of these may be in an acceptable state, but it is not known how long it might be before they degrade excessively and have to be removed from service. Others are known to be in a degraded state but their carrying capacity is not well quantified. There is, therefore, a need to develop new methods that will enable the carrying capacity of these bridges to be well quantified. The webinar begins with an introduction to the type of timber bridges examined and the types of failures that occur together with a short discussion of a current standard method used to assess bridge girders. This is then followed by an introduction to an alternative method, in which the measured individual girder MoR is compared with the loading stress produced by traffic and both a probability of failure and a Safety Index are calculated. This alternative method can be incorporated into a Structural Health Monitoring System. This allows the bridge owner to determine the bridge Safety Index on a daily or continuous basis.
Presenter:
John C Moore has worked as an Electronics Design Engineer for 38 years researching, and commercialising various communication, measurement and control systems. He has worked for the General Electric Company (UK), Australasian Training Aids (Albury, NSW), The Centre for Electronics in Agriculture at the University of New England (Armidale, NSW) and Advanced Measurement and Control (Armidale, NSW). After a short time teaching mathematics at High School, he completed a Master in Resource Science at the University of New England (UNE) in 2009 and a PhD in Civil Engineering in 2013. His current research interest is structural health monitoring, particularly of timber beam bridges.
