The building and ongoing maintenance of bridges and infrastructure continues to be an important area. TWI’s expertise in joining metals and composites is particularly valued for new build, where Members are often interested in developing detailed design strategies to avoid potential problems with fatigue and corrosion, as well as ensuring that an optimal fabrication scheme is followed.
TWI can assist with through-life support, including life extension and strengthening of civil assets, repair, condition monitoring and risk-based asset management.
TWI carries out engineering critical assessments (ECA) to assess the need for, and scope of, necessary repairs. TWI has many decades of experience of analysing the fatigue performance of bridges and other structures.
Many older structures are fabricated from cast iron, wrought iron and pre-1960s steel which do not respond to welding procedures designed for modern steels. TWI has specialist knowledge in repair techniques for these materials and can ensure that costly errors are avoided.
Older structures, for example bridges, were often not designed with much thought to how they might be inspected. Accurate knowledge of defect size allows an effective repair strategy, or it may even be that analysis reveals that urgent repair is not required. TWI’s specialist knowledge of non-destructive testing (NDT) has helped many Members to gain useful insight when the use of more traditional methods of NDT were not possible.
Clients are increasingly interested in the cost-effective targeting of resources to achieve long term availability of trouble-free assets.
For more information, please email contactus@twi.co.uk.