LifeSpan Technologies provides objective, actionable information so that states, cities, and other owners can safely derive the lowest life-cycle cost from their bridge and other structural assets.
LifeSpan Technologies delivers condition assessment solutions utilizing patented, industrial-grade sensing; wireless datacom; and view-anywhere, Internet-based information technologies with four-nines reliability.
Using LifeSpan’s solutions, our clients can spend more time analyzing precise, real-time structural information to support difficult decisions involving structural maintenance, repair, or replacement; rather than relying solely on subjective visual inspection data.
Why the SENTINELSM solution can save millions for bridge owners:
For almost 60 years, bridges have been visually inspected every two years, or more often if load restricted, to determine their structural condition, enhancing user safety and informing owners if expensive bridge repairs or replacements are presumed necessary.
Generally speaking, this FHWA required condition assessment regulation has been beneficial. However, its subjective, variable, condition rating and subsequent owner’s decisions have been overly conservative by design, often resulting in too-severe bridge condition downgrading and expensive follow-on projects that may not have been necessary.
That’s why LifeSpan’s SENTINELSM solution was developed for primary use by County and City Public Works Departments and other typically short span bridge owners.
As the AASHTO Manual for Bridge Evaluation (MBE) clearly states: “The actual performance of most bridges is more favorable than conventional theory dictates.” Also, “…it may be beneficial to the bridge owner to take advantage of some of the bridge’s inherent extra capacity that may have been ignored in conventional calculations.” Wise words, but the “how” is missing, until now.
For nearly 25 years, LifeSpan Technologies and its competitors have been actively promoting the use of structural monitoring to improve condition assessment, using highly accurate sensors and diligent analysis of the captured performance data. But continuous monitoring can be quite expensive and many bridge owners have been reluctant to use this technology for that reason.
One of the more disruptive outcomes from sole reliance on visual inspection findings has been bridge load restrictions, i.e. postings. There are approximately 60,000 posted bridges across the US today, most owned and managed by local government entities. These postings increase costs for farmers, trucking firms, manufacturers, distributors and others by requiring detours, some lengthy. In addition, detours often delay first responders – think heavy fire trucks – negatively impacting community safety.
The AASHTO MBE clearly supports the use of sensor-supported load testing, which has resulted in a significant percentage of load tests subsequently verifying that postings were not necessary or at very least, relaxed to allow heavier vehicles, while not affecting user safety. That’s good.
But while we support load tests in accordance with AASHTO MBE protocols and have sold many Sensor Kits for that purpose, we have recently questioned the lack of definitive data to justify fairly expensive load testing. Pondering that question, we determined that LifeSpan’s Dual Channel PeakStrainTM sensor can be used as a low-cost, first-step alternative to support or negate decisions to employ expensive load testing. Our unique sensor supports both actions.
Please navigate to our web page describing how this solution acts like the “check-engine” light in your car. It provides precise, objective and timely data to potentially negate posting, load testing and replacements.
