Load-Carrying Capacity Assessment of Deteriorated Rural Bridge

Most of rural bridges have passed 30 years of age since they were built, which have to support unexpected overload caused by changed design load and excessive amount of transportation. For these rural bridges, repairs and replacements are needed. Even though there have been attempt to estimate the safety of existing bridges deteriorated with major defects, those approaches must rely on the observable damage and subsequent decisions are made subjectively. To avoid the high cost of rehabilitation, the bridge rating must correctly represent the present load-carrying capacity. Rating engineers use a methods such as Allowable Stress Design (ASD), Load Factor Design (LFD), and Load Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) to evaluate the bridge load carrying capacity. In this paper, the load rating methods are introduced, and it is illustrated how to use the load test data from literature survey. Load test is conducted to the bridge that was built 30 years ago in rural area. From load test results, new maintenance method is suggested instead of the bridge replacement.