Bridge-Visit in Switzerland
Already six months after the beginning of my Ph.D. I am working in the Laboratory of Maintenance and Safety of Structures MCS in l’EPFL with INFRASTAR , the European Marie Curie Project. I am working on the safety of bridges to find how we can monitor existing bridges for fatigue problem detection. My work is hard, but it is also funny and cool: I am not staying all the time in front of my computer => we have to visit bridges frequently. I am switching between the simulation word and the real world of bridges. Oftentimes I spend hours in front of my computer analyzing the data from monitoring, and sometimes I need to visit our lovely bridges to check if the data acquisition system is working well. Bridges are situated in Switzerland between Lausanne and Bern. Let us take a look at different bridges that I discovered once during one of our bridge-visit. The first picture is about preparing a reinforced-concrete deck to receive a thin layer of Ultra-High Performance F