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 Fibre Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC) for
strengthening.
The second visit was for this railway bridge to check the
monitoring system and to get the load records. Using strain gages
(picture in your right) allows a good
understanding of the structural behavior
of bridges.
Can you imagine that this small
gages, once installed in specific positions can give us an idea of how this huge structure is working?
This arch bridge is made just with concrete, without any reinforcement! Amazing! I am wondering about the magic recipe for such a beautiful and durable concrete. Besides, it is a very nice design.
The last visit was for the Chillon Bridge, in Montreux.
We went inside the bridge girder to get the recoded data from our monitoring system.
Here is a
panoramic view of the Chillon Viaduct
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