A novel fully removable walkway system with non-invasive anchors for structural health inspection and maintenance of historic steel structures

Historic steel structures are generally heritage constructions that must be preserved, where invasive operations such as welding or drilling cannot be performed. Any auxiliary structures installed on these constructions must be easily removable. In addition, historic steel structures such as riveted bridges are difficult to access, making it very difficult to take measurements using contact techniques or to perform structural health inspections. One of the most common needs is the installation of walkways for inspection and especially for maintenance and repair purposes. In this sense, clamp-based connections are a technique for fabricating dismountable systems that allow anchoring to existing structures without performing invasive operations such as welding or drilling. This study proposes, develops, simulates, and tests a novel non-invasive detachable anchorage system for the assembly of temporary walkways for inspecting and maintaining historic steel structures without additional scaffolding. In addition, a methodology is proposed for the easy and correct installation of the proposed system by combining it with LiDAR techniques. The developed system has been assembled and tested in laboratory tests and two real case studies.