Universitätsbibliothek
Weimar Open Access

Rusk Masih

• The US Department of Highways is embarked on a very ambitious program to renovate much of the bridges and highways allover the USA. While it is doing so, it is also trying to take advantage of using such program to enhance the research for future programs. One of those projects is a 1000 ft. (305 m) long concrete bridge in the State of Vermont, located in the North East of USA. It is scheduled forThe US Department of Highways is embarked on a very ambitious program to renovate much of the bridges and highways allover the USA. While it is doing so, it is also trying to take advantage of using such program to enhance the research for future programs. One of those projects is a 1000 ft. (305 m) long concrete bridge in the State of Vermont, located in the North East of USA. It is scheduled for renovation, in which the deck and its side parapet walls will be replaced. New England Transportation Consortium (NETC) decided to make further use of this project to find what effect will the heavy demolition tools have on the concrete to remain in place. The goal is to find out the extent of the experimental measurement agreement with the analytical results. In order to accomplish such a goal, numerous strain gages were installed at and in the vicinity of the demolition areas. Those gages will measure the effect of the demolition on the adjacent areas, and how far the destructive effect of the powerful demolition tools can propagate through different parts of the structure. The gages are connected to National Instruments data acquisition equipment, which is connected to a lap top computer to save all the acquired data. The analytical part the project will be using the energy method, which means that the energy applied by the demolition tools should equal the energy absorbed by the demolished structure, in elastic and plastic deformation forms.…