DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING

SPECIALTY SEMINAR
Performance Monitoring on Long-Span Bridges
Limin Sun, Ph.D.
Chair Professor, Director
Department of Tongji University, China
Adjunct Professor,
Institute of Advanced Sciences
Yokohama National University, Japan
Vice-President of IABSE

Friday, August 3, 2018

11:00 AM - Ryon Lab 112

Summary: Long span bridges are one kind of the most important infrastructures in transportation system. The
importance of operation condition, namely the safety, durability and serviceability of existing long-span bridges has
drawn the attention of bridge management authorities and engineers. The management and maintenance of these
infrastructures gradually turn into the main societal demands. Many long-span bridges, including aged ones and newly-
constructed ones, have installed Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) Systems to provide information for structural
maintenances. It was expected that this new technology can automatically, quantitatively identify structural damage and
evaluate conditions of bridges under operation for decision-making of management. The bridge maintenance management
based on SHM, however, is still facing many challenges. This presentation reports the recent development and challenges
of long-span bridge maintenance especially in China. Following a brief review on the implementation experience of SHM
system for long-span bridge projects in recent, the paper enumerates the technical challenging issues faced for long bridge
performance monitoring, and the R&D in progress and the prospection in the near future are also introduced.

Bio:Dr. Limin Sun received the B. E. degrees in civil engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1985, M.
E. (in 1988) and Ph. D. (in 1991) of civil engineering from University of Tokyo, Japan. He obtained his license of PE
(Orange, USA) in 1997. He used to work as a research engineer in Technical Research Institute, Obayashi Corporation,
Japan, from 1992-2000. He is currently the director and a Chair Professor of Bridge Engineering Department in Tongji
University, China, and IAS Adjunct Professor in Yokohama National University in Japan and. His research interests are in
the areas of bridge engineering, in particular vibration control of bridge structures, health monitoring of large span
bridges, and nonlinear seismic response of RC bridges. He is the vice-president of IABSE, the member of ASCE and
CCES (China civil engineering society).