LiveTalk 2020-07-24 "Improvement of bridge inspection in Germany" with Ralph Holst

This LiveTalk has as speaker Ralph Holst, Senior Researcher working in the Department of bridges and Structural Technology at the Federal Highway Research Institute and deputy Head of Section “Maintenance of Engineering Structures”.
Since 2002 he is responsible for the topic bridge inspection and bridge Management. The Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) is part of the Federal Ministry of Transportation and Digital Infrastructure and acts as an adviser for the Ministry and as a Research Institute which carries out external and internal research work and takes part in international projects.
Improvement of bridge inspection in Germany by including innovative technologies and further training of inspection staff
The aging road infrastructure and especially the bridges and their condition are a huge challenge for all bridge owners. They have to modernize the infrastructure and make it fit for the future. To find the best technical and economic solutions a comprehensive overview about the condition of the bridges is the most important requirement. In most developed countries a visual, handnear inspection carried out by an trained inspection team is the normal way of inspection. This is a very time and cost consuming way and very often dangerous for the inspectors but also for the traffic because of lane restriction during inspection and the traffic itself. Therefore an important topic for the BASt-Bridge Department is to find new ways to support the bridge inspection by bringing in new technologies into practice to optimise the quality of bridge assessment and to reduce costs and danger. So this talk will present some techniques and how they can upgrade the bridge inspection. An very important other aspect is that these new techniques can bring digitalisation into the bridge inspection to crate a better basis for further application maybe in the field of Building Information Management (BIM).