The past few years has seen a significant increase in construction of cable-stayed bridges. As it is often the case, when designing bridges, engineers are usually so focused on solving the intricate problems and issues related to design and construction that they inadvertently tend to overlook potential effects of their design and detailing choices on the durability, maintenance needs, and long-term behavior of structural elements and details. The specialized and detailed inspection of many cable stayed bridges over the past decade has led to discovery of problem conditions that seem to be consistent across many types of cable-stayed bridges and stay cable designs. This necessitated development and implementation of new approaches and methods applicable to stay cable systems. This paper discusses advances in evaluation and health monitoring of cable-stayed bridges and available methods, and introduces a unified evaluation approach. Global and local damage detection methods are used in this approach to complement each other. The paper also summarizes the findings of several investigations conducted to date. Copyright ASCE 2006.
