Strong Motion Instrumentation Plan for the Utah Department of Transportation

摘要

The State of Utah, and its people have invested a considerable amount of money to construct and maintain the infrastructure and bridges in the state. This entire transportation network is at risk in the event of an earthquake. To protect Utah's bridges from a strong motion event site and bridge behavior must be better understood. Instrumenting bridges to collect data during such an event is of great importance. Strong motion data collection can cost tens of thousands of dollars for initiation installation and even more for routine maintenance. As such, Utah faces the challenge of deciding which bridges to instrument to achieve optimal data collection but at the lowest cost possible. An analysis was performed on some of Utah's bridges to further understand bridge behavior in a strong motion event and to design an optimal instrumentation plan. This knowledge can be applied to other bridges which assists in knowing which bridges to instrument and in which configuration the instruments should be installed. A weighted decision tree was developed using several criteria, which allows a person or organization to quickly evaluate any number of bridges (side-by-side) to see which of the bridges actually merits instrumentation. Funding for the research comes from the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT).