Condition Assessment of Civil Infrastructure in Europe: Recent Developments and What Might Be Ahead

Infrastructure is subject to continuous aging. This has given life-cycle management of the infrastructure an increasing role. Therefore, reliable inspection and monitoring tools are in increasing demand. The paper provides a short overview of the major activities in this area in Europe, followed by a presentation of current projects in the field of civil engineering in which topics related to combinations of nondestructive testing (NDT) methods and modular control and data acquisition approaches are discussed. In this paper, the two major construction materials in civil engineering, steel and concrete, are discussed. Regarding reinforced as well as prestressed concrete, a combination of various NDT methods is often required, which allow reliable results for material characterization, flaw detection, and the determination of component-specific geometry parameters. Therefore, a multisensor measurement approach with a high degree of automation is required. Two recently developed measurement devices (OSSCAR and BetoScan) will be described. Regarding steel constructions, an example from the field of pipeline inspection is shown where the combination of NDT with fracture mechanical assessment is directly possible. Both fields deliver the required interfaces in which the fracture risk is evaluated in probabilistic terms. Therefore, this procedure can be used as a tool for inspection-based lifetime conceptions. The paper concludes with an outlook on future trends for degradation monitoring.