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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

A Comprehensive Framework For Life-Cycle Cost Assessment Of Reinforced Concrete Bridge Decks, Mohamed Soliman, Samir Ahmed, Ligang Shen Aug 2019

A Comprehensive Framework For Life-Cycle Cost Assessment Of Reinforced Concrete Bridge Decks, Mohamed Soliman, Samir Ahmed, Ligang Shen

Publications

Various environmental and mechanical stressors cause deterioration of concrete bridge decks. Normal wear and tear, freeze and thaw cycles, and chloride penetration due to deicing salts can cause aggressive deterioration that usually require frequent interventions during the life-cycle of the bridge. These interventions include deck maintenance and repairs (e.g., application of sealers or overlay placement) as well as bridge deck replacement. The quantification of the life-cycle cost of bridge decks considering maintenance and repair activities represents a significant challenge facing local and state transportation agencies. The life-cycle maintenance activities not only increase the direct life-cycle cost of the bridge, but …


Bridge Deck Delamination Segmentation Based On Aerial Thermography Through Regularized Grayscale Morphological Reconstruction And Gradient Statistics, Chongsheng Cheng, Zhexiong Shang, Zhigang Shen Mar 2019

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 …