Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

As bridges around the world reach the end of their service lives, they often must be kept in service beyond their design lifetime due to budgetary and network operation constraints. For example, bridges on the London Underground, some of which date back to the 1800s, must be kept in-service to ensure the network can adequately meet the passenger demand. Commonly these bridges are assessed based on the results of visual inspections, however, these results are often highly subjective, cannot identify internal deterioration or defects, and do not provide quantitative data for use in an assessment. Also, they cannot be used effectively to monitor the real-time condition of a structure. As such, there is a growing need for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) techniques to supplement visual inspections as more and more bridges are in need of in-depth assessments and on-going monitoring to ensure they are still fit for purpose. SHM using distributed sensing offers a potential solution to this problem. There exist a number of potential distributed sensing technologies that could provide data to help inform bridge assessments including but not limited to wireless sensor networks (WSNs), fibre optic sensors (FOS), and digital image correlation (DIC). This research topic examines the use of SHM to assess and monitor bridges, with a particular focus on distributed sensing technologies. This topic includes a variety of investigations from the development of sensing technologies for SHM, to their application on bridges in the field, to the analysis of sensor data for use in structural assessment and damage detection.