Belén Riveiro is an Associate Professor of Structural Engineering at the University of Vigo. She has been an Associate Professor in Geomatics at Newcastle University (UK), and was a postdoctoral visiting research fellow at the University of Minho (2012 and 2014), the University of Cambridge (2015) and at Delft University of Technology (2016). Her research is focused on the use of remote sensing in structural engineering for the automated modelling, inspection and material characterization using inverse analysis procedures. She has been principal Investigator in several national and international research and innovation projects and coordinator of an European action on the resilience of transport infrastructure to extreme events (H2020 SAFEWAY project).

Applications of laser scanning in the evaluation of ageing bridges

There is an increasing concern about the exposure of ageing infrastructure assets to extreme events and their recovery capability. Bridges are challenging structures to design and built, and become one of the most vulnerable assets within the transportation network. Digitalization is playing a key role in the adoption of innovative methods that allow optimizing maintenance expenditures. As a result, new techniques in data acquisition and monitoring are being proposed to accurately assess the health condition of in-service structures.

This talk will present some recent examples of the research where laser scanning has been demonstrated to be a suitable technology to assess the actual condition of various types of in-service bridges, with the purpose of being used for the structural diagnosis. Automated data processing will be another key point in this talk, motivated by the Big Data nature of the datasets typically collected during the survey and monitoring of large infrastructure. A revision of methods successfully applied to the processing of the aforementioned data will be presented, complemented with real case studies where the different methodologies have been demonstrated.