SBIR Phase I: Submerged Bridge Pile Inspection Technology

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I research project will advance the state-of-the-art in underwater bridge inspection through development of novel long range ultrasonic technology (LRUT). The objective of this project is to determine if the proposed technology can minimize the requirement to use diving teams for underwater bridge inspection. This will be the first effort to apply LRUT to inspection of steel bridge H-pile. The objective of this work is to build upon the detection capability by studying how effectively and reliably the technology can quantify bridge pile wall loss. This project will focus on detection and classification of 25%, 50%, 75%, 100% wall loss. Inspection and data interpretation procedures will be developed and studied to determine how effective the technology classifies detected wall loss. The wall loss information will be used by the bridge engineer to load rate the bridge. There are thousands of bridges supported by steel pile in the U.S. The conditions of these H-piles are unknown due to the high-costs of diving teams used to perform underwater bridge inspections. The proposed technology will be low-cost and shall be performed above the water line. The objective of the proposed technology is to inspect two orders of magnitude (100X) more bridge piles at current inspection budget levels. The technology will have a significant impact in bridge safety and reliability in the U.S. This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).