Ensuring the Safety of Bridges in New Jersey and Across the Country

Rutgers is home to the world’s first lab to evaluate the condition and safety of bridges.  

New Jersey sits at the epicenter of the Boston to Washington, DC, northeast corridor, a region accounting for one-fifth of the nation’s economy. With its strategic location, New Jersey is a vital conduit for commercial and commuter transport. Essential to this transportation ecosystem are New Jersey’s 6,800 bridges, 410 of which are classified as structurally deficient according to national bridge data from the Federal Highway Administration.

Rutgers’ Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT) is where New Jersey turns for data, training, and research on bridge and road safety. The center trains more than 8,000 transportation professionals annually, conducts innovative research, and operates the world’s first accelerated bridge-testing laboratory: the BEAST (Bridge Evaluation and Accelerated Structural Testing Facility). The BEAST is a virtual “crystal ball” for bridge design, management, and maintenance teams on how various materials, designs, preservation, and repair methods will perform years in the future. Data on the wear and tear of bridges can help inform and improve maintenance planning and spending and extend the life of bridges.

A game-changing tool, the BEAST is the only full-scale bridge laboratory that highly compresses the time it takes to gather critical data on how extreme weather and heavy traffic affect the structural integrity of bridge superstructures. In just one year, the BEAST creates a decade’s worth of real-world wear and tear, according to Rutgers professor of civil engineering Nenad Gucunski.

With its specialized capabilities, the BEAST evaluates existing bridge material and tries out new material and approaches for building better and safer 21st-century bridge decks. The process includes creating a bridge specimen, enclosing it in the BEAST’s environmental chamber, and running up to 17,000 heavy-carriage passes per day to simulate vehicle traffic, adding cycles of heating, freezing, precipitation, and de-icing chemicals.

In one BEAST study, Rutgers evaluated the performance of a typical bare reinforced concrete bridge deck and a new restorative deck overlay system, an ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) notable for its durability and long-term cost-effectiveness. The BEAST subjected the deck to more than 2 million passes of rolling load, 85 freeze-thaw cycles, and over 3,000 gallons of salt brine, simulating decades of service life in just two years. When the bridge was sufficiently deteriorated, Rutgers applied the new UHPC overlay for repair, rehabilitation, and preservation and tested it under more than 4 million passes of rolling load. The results confirmed a superior performance of a UHPC-overlaid deck over a bare concrete deck. Bridges in four New Jersey counties are in a pilot program to test the ultra-high-performance concrete to see if it can extend the life and safety of the bridges.

Rutgers contributes to other New Jersey road and bridge projects. One example is the replacement of Hudson County’s Portal Bridge by NJ Transit, a vital link in the northeast corridor rail line that serves Amtrak and NJ Transit. Built in 1910, the Portal Bridge carries more than 450 trains and 200,000 passengers daily. Rutgers collaborated with NJ Transit to play a critical role in securing funding to reconstruct an electrical substation in Kearny, N.J., that supplies power to a stretch of the line.

Beyond New Jersey are the nation’s other 600,000-plus bridges, about half of which are over 50 years old, with many rated “structurally deficient.”  Learning about new technologies to keep bridges in good repair is a formidable challenge, with no single source aggregating the latest innovations. To address this critical information gap, CAIT is leading a team from five universities and an industry partner to develop the Advanced Bridge Technology Clearinghouse, a five-year project that will serve New Jersey and the nation by making available an AI-driven database of the latest bridge technology advances. By making this information more widely available, Rutgers is supporting bridge and infrastructure improvements and safety enhancements nationwide.