How is the structural integrity of very old buildings, bridges, etc. tested to ensure suitable use by people, cars, etc?
In: Engineering
I’m a Civil Engineer too from Brazil, let me just mention something.
It’s very usual here to have old buildings which you haven’t got the structural plans to, and you can’t guarantee the original builder followed the codes of the time (they don’t even follow it now.)
So one technique that’s particularly interesting to test the strength of the concrete is that you can cut a cilinder out of a few columns (there are places in the column that you can do this safely) and test that cilinder’s strength on a concrete press. This tells you how strong the concrete is, and you can close the hole with stronger concrete later.
This is called destructive testing, and there are many non-destructive methods available, but this is a fairly straightforward as many labs would have a concrete press.
Of course this doesn’t cover the steel reinforcement, but as was already said that can be evaluated by other techniques.
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