Just how long will it be before a bridge deck needs to be rehabilitated? Why not look to history to find out?

Researchers have put several decades of MnDOT bridge inspection records to good use by analyzing old bridge deck condition reports to calculate how quickly similar bridge decks will deteriorate.

MnDOT inspects bridges regularly, but had never used this historical data to help determine the rate of bridge deck deterioration and what factors influence it.

“We’re always trying to improve the timing of bridge deck repair projects and improve our understanding of what contributors affect the way our bridge decks deteriorate,” said Dustin Thomas, MnDOT’s South Region Bridge Construction Engineer.

Data-Crunching

From their analysis, researchers created deterioration tables that can be used to better predict the timing and costs of repairs and maintenance.

Researchers looked at the inspection history and construction details of 2,601 bridges to determine the impact of factors such as type of deck reinforcement, depth of reinforcement below the driving surface, traffic levels and bridge location.

Using the inspection data, researchers developed curves that show how long a bridge deck is likely to stay at a given condition before dropping to the next. They developed separate curves for each variable that had a significant impact on deck deterioration rates.

What They Found

Several factors were found to have a notable impact on how quickly bridge decks deteriorate:

Decks without epoxy-coated bars built between 1975 and 1989 deteriorate more quickly than other bridge decks.
Bridges with less traffic showed slightly slower rates of deterioration than highly traveled bridges.
Metro area bridges drop to a condition code of 7 (good) more quickly than bridges in other parts of the state. This may be due to increased chemical deicer usage or because maintenance activities like crack-sealing are more likely to be delayed on larger metro bridges because of the difficulty accessing middle lanes.
When a new deck is installed on an existing bridge, the deck performs like a brand-new bridge and so MnDOT should use the deterioration table for the re-decking year, rather than the year the bridge was originally constructed.

MnDOT plans to incorporate future bridge inspections into the dataset to enhance the predictive value of the deterioration tables.