ABSTRACT
Maintenance of deteriorated facilities is perceived as a critical social issue in advanced countries. Its cost may rapidly increase when the social consequences in terms of the asset value of the facilities are considered, along with the direct cost of maintenance. According to the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card 2017, in the United States of America, approximately 148 trillion Korean won of costs are expected for maintenance and reinforcement of deteriorated bridges aged 30 years or over. Data from Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport shows that there were 3,454 bridges aged 30 years or over in Korea in 2017, and that this number will rapidly increase to 10,961 in 2027. 30 years from now, maintenance costs will be consistently incurred for more than 32,000 old bridges in Korea. Such increasing trends are observed in the US, Japan, and in Korea.To resolve such issues, diverse studies have been conducted predicting the residual life of old bridges based on bridge performance evaluation, and also assessing the load carrying capacity of old bridges. However, criteria for reliability of bridge performance evaluation, and for objective verification of the effect of bridge reinforcement and maintenance, have yet to be established. There are two main reasons for the lack of such research. Firstly, most past studies on performance evaluation, maintenance, and reinforcement techniques, could only be performed on a limited specimen from a building element, or by small-scale simulations that struggled to fully reflect the deterioration factors of complex materials in diverse environments. Secondly, it is difficult to verify the performance evaluation of bridges, as opposed to state evaluation, quantitatively.In this research, a demolished bridge was examined directly, in order to analyze the cause of functional deterioration by conducting a fracture test and a material test. Moreover, in order to perform quantitative effect verification of the reinforcement and maintenance practices that had been used on the bridge. Direct examination of a demolished bridge is a rare opportunity, seldom seen in civil engineering research worldwide. The aim of conducting such research is to provide important basic reference data for efficient decision-making and institutional improvement, in order to provide better maintenance of old and deteriorated bridges.
