Health monitoring of civil infrastructures

Reliable health monitoring, including nondestructive evaluation, is an essential part of the feedback and monitoring system for infrastructures. The goal of this paper is to provide a summary of recent research activities that will act as a catalyst to expand interest in the development of new health monitoring technologies. The paper describes the motivation for developing innovative tools for monitoring the health of the USA's infrastructure. An overview of initiatives sponsored by the National Science Foundation to develop new technologies is presented. The paper includes a review of the state-of-the-art stress-wave methods for the evaluation of structural materials and pavements at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Finally, efforts at the Federal Highway Administration to develop new technologies for the assessment of the nearly 500 000 bridges along the USA's roads and highways are described.