Causes and statistical characteristics of bridge failures:A review

Bridge failure, which is generally associated with serious economic and life losses, is defined as the incapacity of a constructed bridge or its components to perform as specified in the design and construction requirements. This paper presents an overview of current researches on the typical characteristics and causes of bridge failures based on 10 former investigations. Principal causes can be divided into internal causes and external causes or natural factors and human factors. Design error, construction mistakes, hydraulic, collision, and overload are the top 5 leading causes of bridge failures, resulting in more than70% of the bridge failures. Causes of bridge failures are closely related to regional economy,structural type, type of use, material type, and service age. The failure rate is very high for steel bridges, which is inseparable from excessive emphasis on structure strength but lack of consideration on structure stability and fatigue in early years. Researchers need to strengthen their research on the stability and fatigue of steel bridges, as well as inspection and maintenance. Extreme loads such as flood, collision, and overload contribute to a large number of bridge failures because of the lack of extreme loads data and design theory defects. It is critical for such bridges to have sufficient redundancy and capacity protection measures to reduce the probability of bridge failure due to extreme loads. Previous statistical methods and classification methods for the characteristics and causes of bridge failures lack unified standards, and a more scientific method needs to be established. A comprehensive electronic database on bridge damage and failures needs to be developed to establish damage models and conduct forensic studies to improve the design theory and specifications.

Reliability of IEC 61850 based substation communication network architecture considering quality of repairs and common cause failures

Mission-critical IEC 61850 system architectures are designed to tolerate hardware failures to achieve the highest reliability performance.Hence,multi-channel systems are used in such systems within industrial facilities to isolate machinery when there are process abnormalities.Inevitably,multi-channel systems introduce Common Cause Failure(CCF)since the subsystems can rarely be independent.This paper integrates CCF into the Markov reliability model to enhance the model flexibility to investigate synchronous generator intra-bay SCN architecture reliability performance considering the quality of repairs and CCF.The Markov process enables integration of the impact of CCF factors on system performance.The case study results indicate that CCF,coupled with imperfect repairs,significantly reduce system reliability performance.High sensitivity is observed at low levels of CCF,whereas the highest level of impact occurs when the system diagnostic coverage is 99%based on ISO 13849-1,and reduces as the diagnostic coverage level reduces.Therefore,it is concluded that the severity of CCF depends more on system diagnostic coverage level than the repair efficiency,although both factors impact the system overall performance.Hence,CCF should be con-sidered in determining the reliability performance of mission-critical communication networks in power distribution centres.