The first “modern” type of vehicular bridge was built in Hong Kong China in the 1920s. The need for an efficient transportation system to cope with population growth and enable economic development has demanded the construction of more and more bridges since the middle of the 20th century. By 2007, Hong Kong had a total of about 1300 vehicular bridges. Four of these bridges, including the Tsing Ma Bridge, Kap Shui Mun Bridge, Ting Kau Bridge, and the cable-stayed bridge on the Hong Kong- Shenzhen Western Corridor, are considered to be major bridges supported by cables. Currently, the Stonecutters Bridge on Route No. 8 is under construction and is expected to be completed in late 2009. At the same time, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge will be in its detailed design stage soon. While efforts have been made by bridge builders to construct these giant structures, the upkeeping of these valuable assets at a high standard and ensuring their continuous functioning and performance during their intended lifespans will be another important task for bridge engineers. Wind and structural health monitoring system (WASHMS) will play a key role in this respect.

Opened to traffic in August 2004, the Rion-Antirion Bridge crosses the Gulf of Corinth near Patras in western Greece. It consists of an impressive multi cable-stayed span bridge connected to the land by two approaches.

An exceptional combination of physical conditions made this project quite unusual: high water depth, deep strata of weak soil, strong seismic activity and fault displacements. In addition a risk of heavy ship collision had to be taken into account.

The structure has been designed in view of challenging severe earthquakes and ensuring the everyday serviceability of the link as well. To make the bridge feasible, innovative techniques had to be developed: The strength of the in situ soil has been improved by means of inclusions; the bridge deck has been suspended on its full length, and therefore isolated as much as it can be.

The Dongshuimen Bridge over the Yangtze River and the Qiansimen Bridge over the Jialing River in Chongqing, China are located at the tip of the Yuzhong Peninsula. Together, they are called the Twin River Bridges. Both are double deck structures carrying four lanes of traffic on their upper decks and two transit tracks on their lower decks. The girders are steel truss structures with orthotropic plates and the towers are made of concrete. Aesthetics were carefully considered for the design of these bridges because of their visibility in the city and their neighboring landmarks.

The concept of sustainability is described in this paper using a single sustainable principle, two goals of sustainable development, three dimensions of sustainable engineering, four sustainable requirements and five phases of sustainable construction. Four sustainable requirements and their practice in China are discussed in particular. The safe reliability of bridges is first compared with the events of bridge failure in China and in the rest of the world and followed by structural durability, including the cracking of concrete cable-stayed bridges, deflection of concrete girder bridges and fatigue cracks of orthotropic steel decks. With respect to functional adaptability, lateral wind action on vehicles and its improvement are introduced regarding a sea-crossing bridge located in a typhoon-prone area. The Chinese practice of using two double main span suspension bridges and a twin parallel deck cable-stayed bridge is presented in discussing the final sustainable requirement: capacity extensibility.

This paper presents the first of a series of studies on the seismic design of high-rise towers for cable-stayed bridges under strong earthquakes. One practical cable-stayed bridge with a 730 m long main span and two high-rise towers over 200 m in height was selected for this study. The preliminary results show that compared with piers, the tower is more vulnerable to pulse-like earthquakes, and it may develop plasticity at certain locations. In addition, viscous dampers may not have the same effect during pulse-like earthquakes as they do under site-specific earthquakes. Hence, reoptimization of damper parameters or reconsideration of other energy dissipation devices will be needed if strong earthquakes are likely to occur.

This paper presents a numerical simulation study on electromechanical impedance technique for structural damage identification. The basic principle of impedance based damage detection is structural impedance will vary with the occurrence and development of structural damage, which can be measured from electromechanical admittance curves acquired from PZT patches. Therefore, structure damage can be identified from the electromechanical admittance measurements. In this study, a model based method that can identify both location and severity of structural damage through the minimization of the deviations between structural impedance curves and numerically computed response is developed. The numerical model is set up using the spectral element method, which is promised to be of high numerical efficiency and computational accuracy in the high frequency range. An optimization procedure is then formulated to estimate the property change of structural elements from the electric admittance measurement of PZT patches. A case study on a pin-pin bar is conducted to investigate the feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that the presented method can accurately identify bar damage location and severity even when the measurements are polluted by 5% noise.

This paper aims at developing a structural health monitoring (SHM)-based bridge rating method for bridge inspection of long-span cable-supported bridges. The fuzzy based analytic hierarchy approach is employed, and the hierarchical structure for synthetic rating of each structural component of the bridge is proposed. The criticality and vulnerability analyses are performed largely based on the field measurement data from the SHM system installed in the bridge to offer relatively accurate condition evaluation of the bridge and to reduce uncertainties involved in the existing rating method. The procedures for determining relative weighs and fuzzy synthetic ratings for both criticality and vulnerability are then suggested. The fuzzy synthetic decisions for inspection are made in consideration of the synthetic ratings of all structural components. The SHM-based bridge rating method is finally applied to the Tsing Ma suspension bridge in Hong Kong as a case study. The results show that the proposed method is feasible and it can be used in practice for long-span cable-supported bridges with SHM system.

Modern bridge building is much more than concrete, steel and money. The overall socioeconomic impact, influence on people migration, traffic, use of primary materials, safety of construction impact on the environment, energy, risk scenarios, health, and most relevant now: climate and CO₂ emissions, are among the parameters which enter into the decision process at the overall holistic conceptual level, the more detailed level of selection of bridge sites, and selection of bridge types as well as construction methods and selection of materials and products.

The paper illustrates these dilemmas and illustrates by specific examples how this complicated decision process can be managed and structured in order to arrive at an overall satisfactory solution for design, construction and maintenance throughout the lifetime (life cycle) to these sometimes contradictory parameters and requirements.

A comprehensive analysis was conducted to investigate the seismic performance of a typical tall bridge pier through incremental dynamical analysis (IDA). The effect of higher-order modes was studied specifically. The results showed that higher-order modes significantly contributed to the structural seismic response and should not be neglected. Including these modes resulted in an additional hinge midway up the pier. No plastic hinge would occur at this location for conventional bridge piers. Higher-order modes also led to an out-of-phase response between the hinge rotation at the pier bottom and the displacement at the top. This means that the displacement-based seismic design method cannot correctly predict the mechanical state of the critical hinge and therefore is not suitable for use in the seismic design of tall piers. Mistakenly using the displacement-based seismic design method for tall piers may result in a seriously unsafe condition.

This paper experimentally investigated wire breakage detection in a steel cable by acoustic emission (AE) waveform. In the experiments, the attenuation laws of waveform amplitudes were discussed based on stress wave propagation in the wire, which was generated by kNocking and wire breakage. Then the wave velocity was calculated based on the reach time of the stress wave from each sensor. Finally, based on the waveform attenuation laws and the linear position method, the amplitude and energy of the source were confirmed through the measured waveform to identify the source category. The experimental results illustrated that the stress wave from different sources has a different frequency spectrum, and the amplitude attenuation factor varied with the stress wave frequency; high frequency waves had a greater attenuation factor. Compared with the other source, the wire breakage source contained a much higher energy, and thus, the wire breakage signal can be distinguished from the other source by comparing the non-attenuation energy at the source position.

By examining the two neighboring Haihe Bridges with semi- and full-closed bridge decks, the aerodynamic interference between the two decks on the vortex-induced vibration (VIV) and the corresponding aerodynamic mitigation measures are investigated via a series of wind tunnel tests with a spring-suspended sectional model aided with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The results show that the VIV responses of both bridges can be significantly affected by the aerodynamic interference and that the extent of the influence varies with the shapes of the windward and leeward decks. The VIV amplitudes of the windward bridge are often fairly close to those of the single bridge. However, those of the leeward bridge are magnified substantially by aerodynamic interference if the same structural and aerodynamic configurations are adopted for the two bridges. Otherwise, the VIV responses are not significantly increased and may even be reduced by the aerodynamic interference if different configurations are employed for the two bridges. Furthermore, an effective combined measure of adding wind barriers and sharpening the wind fairing noses of the two box decks is presented for mitigating both the vertical and torsional VIV responses of the windward and leeward bridges.

The area-averaged most unfavorable wind pressure coefficients (MUWPCs) on various regions of building surfaces and the influence of the side ratio and the terrain category were studied based on wind tunnel test data of scale models of typical high-rise buildings with rectangular cross-sections. The negative area-averaged MUWPCs in the middle-height edge areas generally increased with an increasing D/B side ratio. The area-averaged MUWPCs can be well fitted with a function of the average area reduced by the square of the building depth, D². In addition, no unique pattern was found for the effect of the terrain category on the MUWPCs.