In Oct 2018, Dr. Vahid Shahsavari presented the paper entitled “Effect of Damaged Structural Members on Performance Degradation of a Vertical Lift Truss Bridge” at the American Society for Nondestructive Testing (ASNT) Annual Conference, Houston, TX. His talk was about the effect of damaged structural members on the load carrying capacity of the Memorial Bridge. The proposed approach provides a realistic means to determine the members that are key to the overall system strength and should receive more attention by bridge owners and instrumentation engineers. This study was conducted under the direction of Professor. Erin Bell as the Principal Investigator of the Living Bridge Project. The authors acknowledge support from BDI, HNTB, and NHDOT which were instrumental in the design of the structural health monitoring system, model creation, and diagnostic load testing.
