Review Paper: Health Monitoring of Civil Infrastructure

Increased awareness of the economic and social effects of aging, deterioration and extreme events on civil infrastructure has been accompanied by recognition of the need for advanced structural health monitoring and damage detection tools. Today, these tasks are done by visual inspection and very traditional methods such as the tap test. This labor-intensive task is done at a frequency of less than once every two years for bridges, and on an as-needed basis for other infrastructures such as buildings. Structural health monitoring techniques based on changes in dynamic characteristics have been studied for the last three decades. When the damage is substantial, these methods have some success in determining if…

• FH
  Federal Highway Administration