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Understanding and Diagnosing Bridge Defects

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Date

Duration

1 day

Location

In-Person

CPD Hours

7

Price

Member Price 

$850 + GST

Members receive discounted pricing per course/workshop

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Non Member Price 

$1,050 + GST
Enroll

A key task of the bridge manager is to ensure the ongoing integrity of assets by undertaking appropriate inspections at regular intervals. These inspections are used to identify emerging or progressed defects that may affect the safety risk or asset integrity risk of structures on the network. While defects often present in obvious ways, this is not always the case, and the causes are not always as obvious.


Understanding what causes defects and how to diagnose them is a crucial skill set of the asset manager to ensure the safe, appropriate and optimised management of structures. This skill set is equally important for personnel undertaking investigations to ensure effective and appropriate investigations from service providers. 


This one-day program is designed to provide the attendee with a solid grounding in the fundamentals of the causes of bridge defects, and how to investigate and diagnosis them. Attendees will develop confidence and reasoning skills to undertake effective investigations, leading to better decision making around the management of bridge infrastructure.

Content

  • Defect types and visual identification, with a focus on:

  • concrete

  • timber

  • steel

  • Causes of typical defects

  • Investigation approaches

  • Effect of defects on structural capacity and asset residual life

  • Applying critical thinking to decision making

Who should attend?

This program is targeted at those involved in, or responsible for, the decision-making around bridge and structures management, including, but not limited to:

  • engineers and other technical professionals

  • asset managers

  • consultants

  • maintenance managers

  • inspectors

Learning Outcomes 

Attendees will:

  • learn the most common causes of defects in concrete, timber and steel bridges

  • develop investigative skills, enabling them to diagnose defects effectively

  • develop a critical thinking approach to defect investigation

Facilitator

Dr Tim Heldt – Director

Tim’s career spans a range of engineering disciplines, including rail, mining, construction, asset management, research, and development, applied research, and education. Highlights of his career include instrumentation of the Church Street bridge during works in the 90s, remote monitoring of a bridge in NZ and development of health monitoring guidelines for Transit NZ in the same era. Subsequently, he project managed the development of Australia’s first fibre composite bridge, and went on to be technical advisor via FCDD for Australia’s first fibre composite bridge on a road network - installed in NSW (Paper). More recently he led the Structures NACOE (National Asset Centre of Excellence) program during his tenure at ARRB. His work in fibre composites research has won multiple awards. He is the current chair of the Asset Management Steering Committee for the Institute of Public Works Engineers Queensland (IPWEAQ).

Tim’s most recent work has been as a technical specialist advisor to Queensland’s DTMR on the topic of structures asset management and on the evaluation of the bridge network’s halving joint features. His recent acquisition of Osborn has provided the opportunity to build a team commercially offering both boutique and routine services in bridge asset management spanning from design, through assessment and investigation, and life extension.

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