Team of UMass and MassDOT researchers selected to present at prestigious conference

05/28/2018

George Tzortzinis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Brendan Knickle, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Alexander Bardow, MassDOT; Simos Gerasimidis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Sergio Brena, University of Massachusetts have been selected to present at the 2018 Engineering Mechanics Institute Conference, May 29 to June 1 at MIT.

Considered to be the most prestigious national conference on engineering mechanics, this year’s event will feature 1000 papers from all over the world.
 
The team will present on “Deteriorated steel beam ends: Identification and selection of most common corrosion patterns”.
  
The following is the presentation abstract:
As the Commonwealth’s bridge population ages, MassDOT is witnessing more and more instances of deterioration of the web at steel beams ends due to corrosion as a result of leaking bridge joints. This deterioration reduces the load carrying capacity of beams at a critical point where the beam sits on its bearing. In extreme cases, the web fails and the bridge has to be closed. Therefore, the determination of the remaining load carrying capacity is very important, however there are no good methods for performing this analysis and so, it has been very difficult to calculate realistic estimates of the remaining capacity of the web. This presentation includes the outcome of the first part of an ongoing research project on the development of load rating procedures for deteriorated steel beam ends. The goal of this part of the project is to collect data from all the state districts in the form of inspection reports for bridges with deteriorated beam ends and process the information to identify common patterns and characteristics for the deterioration. The processing of the data is performed through a new spreadsheet for each beam end which captures the most important information about the deterioration along with the basic geometrical properties of the beam end. The definition and quantification of the parameters used to categorize the phenomenon will be presented: criticality of the condition, location along span, percentage section loss, length and height of loss, loss coefficient, span of bridge, age of bridge, evolution of the phenomenon in time, etc. Then, statistical distributions of the basic characteristics are developed and finally the most common deterioration patterns are found.

For more information on the conference visit http://umi.mit.edu/EMI2018.