A study of thermal response of concrete towers employing linear regression

It has been shown that the variations of structural properties due to changing environmental conditions such as temperature can be as significant as those caused by structural damage and even liveload. Therefore, tracking changes that are correlated with environmental variations is a necessary step in order to detect and assess structural damage in addition to the normal structural response to traffic. In this paper, daily measurement data that is collected from the concrete towers of the Ironton-Russell Bridge will be presented and correlation of the collected measurement data and temperature will be overviewed. Variation of the daily thermal response of tower concrete walls will be compared with the daily thermal responses of the steel box within the tower and finally, thermal coefficient for compensating the thermal induced responses will be estimated.