• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.845-856
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• 2020

This study proposes a bridge evaluation system for indivisible permit vehicles such as hydraulic cranes. The permit loads for the bridge evaluation are divided into three categories: routine permit loads, special permit 1 loads, and special permit 2 loads. Routine permit and special permit 1 vehicles are allowed to cross a bridge with normal traffic. For these two permits, the standard lane model in the Korean Highway Bridge Design Code was adopted to consider normal traffic in the same lane. Special permit 2 vehicles are assumed to cross a bridge without other traffic. Structural analyses of two prestressed-beam bridges and two steel box girder bridges were conducted for the proposed permit loads. The rating factors of the four bridges for all permit loads were calculated as sufficiently large values for the moment and shear force so that crossing the bridges can be permitted. A reliability assessment of the bridges was performed to identify the reliability levels for the permit vehicles. It was confirmed that the reliability level of the minimum required strength obtained by the load-resistance factors yields the target reliability index of the design code for the permit vehicles.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2022

Despite recent breakthroughs in deep learning and computer vision fields, the pixel-wise identification of tiny objects in high-resolution images with complex disturbances remains challenging. This study proposes a modified U-net for tiny crack segmentation in real-world steel-box-girder bridges. The modified U-net adopts the common U-net framework and a novel Self-Attention-Self-Adaption (SASA) neuron as the fundamental computing element. The Self-Attention module applies softmax and gate operations to obtain the attention vector. It enables the neuron to focus on the most significant receptive fields when processing large-scale feature maps. The Self-Adaption module consists of a multiplayer perceptron subnet and achieves deeper feature extraction inside a single neuron. For data augmentation, a grid-based crack random elastic deformation (CRED) algorithm is designed to enrich the diversities and irregular shapes of distributed cracks. Grid-based uniform control nodes are first set on both input images and binary labels, random offsets are then employed on these control nodes, and bilinear interpolation is performed for the rest pixels. The proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm are simultaneously deployed to train the modified U-net. 200 raw images with a high resolution of 4928 × 3264 are collected, 160 for training and the rest 40 for the test. 512 × 512 patches are generated from the original images by a sliding window with an overlap of 256 as inputs. Results show that the average IoU between the recognized and ground-truth cracks reaches 0.409, which is 29.8% higher than the regular U-net. A five-fold cross-validation study is performed to verify that the proposed method is robust to different training and test images. Ablation experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SASA neuron and CRED algorithm. Promotions of the average IoU individually utilizing the SASA and CRED module add up to the final promotion of the full model, indicating that the SASA and CRED modules contribute to the different stages of model and data in the training process.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.173-184
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• 2023

Presently, the general seismic fragility evaluation method for a bridge system composed of member elements with different nonlinear behaviors against strong earthquakes has been to evaluate at the element-level. This study aims to develop a system-level seismic fragility evaluation method that represents a structural system. Because the seismic behavior of bridges is generally divided into transverse and longitudinal directions, this study evaluated the system-level seismic fragility in both directions separately. The element-level seismic fragility evaluation in the longitudinal direction was performed for piers, bridge bearings, pounding, abutments, and unseating. Because pounding, abutment, and unseating do not affect the transverse directional damages, the element-level seismic fragility evaluation was limited to piers and bridge bearings. Seismic analysis using nonlinear models of various structural members was performed using the OpenSEES program. System-level seismic fragility was evaluated assuming that damage between element-levels was serially connected. Pier damage was identified to have a dominant effect on system-level seismic fragility than other element-level damages. In other words, the most vulnerable element-level seismic fragility has the most dominant effect on the system-level seismic fragility.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.1A
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• pp.75-89
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• 2006

This paper presents a practical and realistic Life-Cycle Cost (LCC) optimum design methodology of steel bridges considering time effect of bridge reliability under environmental stressors such as corrosion and heavy truck traffics. The LCC functions considered in the LCC optimization consist of initial cost, expected life-cycle maintenance cost and expected life-cycle rehabilitation costs including repair/replacement costs, loss of contents or fatality and injury losses, road user costs, and indirect socio-economic losses. For the assessment of the life-cycle rehabilitation costs, the annual probability of failure which depends upon the prior and updated load and resistance histories should be accounted for. For the purpose, Nowak live load model and a modified corrosion propagation model considering corrosion initiation, corrosion rate, and repainting effect are adopted in this study. The proposed methodology is applied to the LCC optimum design problem of an actual steel box girder bridge with 3 continuous spans (40 m+50 m+40 m=130 m), and various sensitivity analyses of types of steel, local corrosion environments, average daily traffic volume, and discount rates are performed to investigate the effects of various design parameters and conditions on the LCC-effectiveness. From the numerical investigation, it has been observed that local corrosion environments and the number of truck traffics significantly influence the LCC-effective optimum design of steel bridges, and thus realized that these conditions should be considered as crucial parameters for the optimum LCC-effective design.