Engineering Commons^™

Condition Assessment Of Bridge Decks With Asphalt Overlay, Sepehr Pashoutani, Jinying Zhu

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

Ground penetrating RADAR (GPR) is a widely used nondestructive testing (NDT) method for bridge deck evaluation. However, the current GPR signal and data processing software and algorithms are not able to provide comprehensive information about bridge deck condition. Although the original objective of this research project was to develop GPR analysis algorithms for condition assessment of bridge decks with asphalt overlay, the scope of work has been expanded to concrete bridge decks with or without overlays.

In this study, the research team developed a complete GPR analysis procedure that includes the following components: 1) obtain zero-time for GPR reflection at …

Bridge Deck Delamination Segmentation Based On Aerial Thermography Through Regularized Grayscale Morphological Reconstruction And Gradient Statistics, Chongsheng Cheng, Zhexiong Shang, Zhigang Shen

Department of Construction Engineering and Management: Faculty Publications

Environmental and surface texture-induced temperature variation across the bridge deck is a major source of errors in delamination detection through thermography. This type of external noise poises a significant challenge for conventional quantitative methods such as global thresholding and k-means clustering. An iterative top-down approach is proposed for delamination segmentation based on grayscale morphological reconstruction. A weight-decay function was used to regularize the reconstruction for regional maxima extraction. The mean and coefficient of variation of temperature gradient estimated from delamination boundaries were used for discrimination. The proposed approach was tested on a lab experiment and an in-service bridge deck. The …