The impact of a PEER funded research project "In-Service Structural Evaluation of Overhead Box Beam Sign Structures" is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is Khalid M. Mosalam, Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering, UC Berkeley. The Research Team includes UC Berkeley Graduate Student Researchers Wenhao Ruan and Gaofeng Su; Selim Gǔnay, UC Berkeley Research and Development Engineer; Jiawei Chen, UC Berkeley Postdoc Researcher, and Amarnath Kasalanati, PEER Associate Director, UC Berkeley.
Download the Research Project Summary which includes the abstract. (PDF)
Research Impact
Caltrans Structures Maintenance and Investigation (SM&I) Division performs field inspections on approximately 16,000 overhead signs. Due to constraints on time, resources, equipment, and traffic, the inspections have not been able to perform detailed assessment on the corrosion issues. The findings of the project and the established mapping between corrosion and strength loss are expected to inform guidelines on how to interpret these inspections for assessing the strength loss and the remaining strength of sign structures. This will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of asset management, and facilitate important decision making, such as prioritizing the structures to be replaced, repaired, or retrofitted.
Methodologies developed for achieving the project objectives