Enhancing Civil Infrastructure Resilience with Structural Health Monitoring

In natural hazardous events such as strong earthquakes, engineers are usually faced with many competing priorities in making safety and occupancy decisions about large inventories of civil infrastructure building and bridge assets and usually there is shortage in experienced engineers available for inspection and repair work. For structural members hidden behind drywall or ceilings, inspection is particularly time consuming and costly because those nonstructural components have to be removed first. One of the ultimate goals in inspection is to quickly and accurately determine the residual capacity (in strength and deformation) of structural members to assure structural safety in future events such as aftershocks. Structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies are useful for rapid structural condition assessment especially for many hidden locations after major hazardous events. This paper describes a strategy for enhancing structural resilience by integrating innovative SHM technologies focused on limited number of structural fuse members within resilient structures. The proposed framework will be helpful in facilitating the implementation of SHM technologies into civil infrastructures by quantifying and comparing the resilience metrics of different SHM options.