Structures Repairs Goes Ultrasonic To increase the safety and useful life of your steel bridges and steel traffic structures, consider going ultrasonic. Ultrasonic impact treatment (UIT) helps prevent fatigue cracking in welds and welded members of new bridges and structures by enhancing the geometry of the weld, introducing favorable compressive stresses, and relieving tensile stresses internal to the weld. Eliminating the fatigue cracking not only increases service life but reduces the overall lifetime cost of maintenance. UIT can also improve the performance of existing structures. Many in-service steel bridges and traffic structures were built before fatigue was understood and therefore have fatigue-prone details, such as cover plates and socket joints. Structure owners must continually monitor these details and often must retrofit them, which is costly and not always effective. Applying UIT minimizes the need for retrofits and extends the life of the structure
