Risk assessment and monitoring for bridges under scour hazard
The RAMOBRIS project aims to develop a novel and multidisciplinary strategy for evaluating the risk of critical bridges against scour, combining hydrological/hydraulic and scour information deriving from both measurements and forecasting, and structural vulnerability assessments. Although scour is the leading cause of bridge failures in Europe and the rest of the world, current practices for bridge scour risk management are quite inefficient, being often based on expensive, potentially inaccurate, and time-consuming visual inspections. Moreover, current procedures do not allow an explicit quantification of the expected direct and indirect losses due to the occurrence of floods. The proposed project aims at overcoming the limitations of current procedures through a novel and multidisciplinary approach exploiting the experience of the fellow in hydraulic monitoring and analysis, with the one of the host and partner organisations in structural health monitoring, structural analysis, risk assessment, flood forecasting and scour analysis. The objectives of RAMOBRIS will be [1] to critically review monitoring techniques available for assessing bridge scour risk; [2] to define a cost-effective monitoring strategy for forecasting and measuring river flow, bridge scour, and bridge-performance; [3] to define an innovative probabilistic framework for real-time scour risk monitoring, using a Bayesian approach to combine the information from heterogeneous monitoring and forecasting systems; [4] to provide a framework for bridge vulnerability assessment based on nonlinear structural analysis under different hydraulic loads and for different bridge typologies, and to estimate current and future risk of bridge collapse due to scour, taking into account climate change effects. The research achievements will significantly contribute to the objectives of the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection and to achievement of a resource efficient economy and society.