Development of an earthquake damage evaluation method for bridge structures using acceleration sensors

After an extreme earthquake, evaluation of damage and operability of bridge structures is currently done based on visual inspection by bridge experts, and there is a need to develop sensing technology to enable speedy and accurate evaluation of the degree of damage and operability of bridge structures. This paper proposes an evaluation method of the degree of damage of bridge structures. A series of shaking table tests of reinforced concrete single-column models validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method. A series of dynamic analyses were carried out to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method for multi-span bridge model. For preventing secondary disasters and securing the traffic network during a disaster, a system, which is designed to collect bridge damage information evaluated with the proposed method, is also developed.