FEHRLopedia

This Guidance for the optimal assessment of highway structures was prepared by the Work Package 15 of the SAMARIS project with the objective to give some instructions on how to improve procedures used for assessment of highway structures, especially bridges. Apart from the overview on condition assessment procedures used in different European countries, the major focus of the report is on the chapter on structural safety assessment where the most important results of the research are presented. These include soft load testing, a diagnostic load testing procedure which gathers the required information for updating of the structural model from the normal traffic rather than from the pre-weighed vehicles. This procedure is more conservative than the traditional diagnostic load test, but is on the other hand considerably cheaper and does not require closing lanes to traffic.

The other two major results of this research are:

(a) a new assessment live load model which can be adjusted to reflect truck numbers and distribution of truck weights and

(b) evidence from computer models and, for the first time ever, experimental evidence showing that the Dynamic Amplification Factor is decreasing with increasing weight of vehicles on the bridge. Both can be seen as major savers in optimised structural assessment of highway structures.