Effects of Deterioration on Safety and Reliability of Structures

Deterioration of structural and non-structural elements in commercial, industrial and residential constructions is of general concern to investors, design engineers, architects, contractors and legal/insurance professionals. Issues of interest are deterioration mechanisms, damage prediction and assessment techniques, and methods to reduce maintenance and repair costs and to improve safety and reliability. A collection of four papers in this volume provides a status summary of these issues. The first paper discusses the effects of design/construction/maintenance practices on structural deterioration in concrete, steel and timber constructions. Many structural failure cases were cited for illustration. It is recommended that designers and contractors should provide clear guidelines for periodic inspection and maintenance programs for passive structural systems such as building structures. The second paper discusses in depth various aspects of deterioration prevention in timber design. The third paper summarizes a comprehensive approach to perform safety evaluation of existing structures including the use of expert systems, field data, laboratory testing and computational analyses. The fourth paper reports an analytical investigation on the effects of damage/deterioration of members of redundant structures on structural reliability. Cases analyzed were truss systems found in common bridge constructions.