Härtill 8 uppsatser

Diss. (sammanfattning) Lund : Lunds universitet, 2022

Climate change can impose considerable risks to the safety and performance of built infrastructure. Understanding these risks is of paramount importance, especially for long-lived infrastructure elements. This thesis contributes to this overarching aim and investigates the risks of climate change with particular focus on one of the main elements of modern built infrastructure, bridges. The thesis focuses on Swedish climate conditions and spans the different stages that typically constitute the risk assessment process, i.e., risk identification, risk analysis, and risk evaluation and treatment. The thesis starts by presenting a comprehensive identification of the potential climate change risks to bridges. Subsequently, a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method for prioritizing the identified risks for a certain bridge of interest is proposed. This method can also be adopted to prioritize an ensemble of bridges based on climate change risks. Four climate change risks are then investigated in more detail: 1) the impact of climate change on chloride-induced corrosion of RC structures, 2) the impact of climate change on fungal decay of timber elements in-ground contact, 3) the impact of climate change on creep of concrete structures, and 4) the impact of climate change on local bridge-pier scour. The first three risks are analyzed through a full probabilistic analysis for illustrative case studies. On the other hand, for analyzing the impact of climate change on bridge-pier scour a novel national-level method, based on possibility theory, is proposed for identifying the catchments areas with the highest (or lowest) increase in equilibrium scour depth. Lastly, this thesis reviews the possible adaptation techniques for existing bridges and proposes a conceptual framework for the design of new bridges considering climate change risks. Although the focus of the current thesis is on bridges, many of the methods proposed in this thesis and its findings are relevant to other infrastructure elements.