Experimental Research on Quick Structural Health Monitoring Technique for Bridges Using Smartphone

Xuefeng Zhao,Yan Yu,Kwang Ri,Ruicong Han,Mingchu Li,Jinping Ou

doi:10.1155/2016/1871230

Abstract

In the recent years, with the development and popularization of smartphone, the utilization of smartphone in the Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has attracted increasing attention owing to its unique feature. Since bridges are of great importance to society and economy, bridge health monitoring has very practical significance during its service life. Furthermore, rapid damage assessment of bridge after an extreme event such as earthquake is very important in the recovery work. Smartphone-based bridge health monitoring and postevent damage evaluation have advantages over the conventional monitoring techniques, such as low cost, ease of installation, and convenience. Therefore, this study investigates the implementation feasibility of the quick bridge health monitoring technique using smartphone. A novel vision-based cable force measurement method using smartphone camera is proposed, and, then, its feasibility and practicality is initially validated through cable model test. An experiment regarding multiple parameters monitoring of one bridge scale model is carried out. Parameters, such as acceleration, displacement, and angle, are monitored using smartphone. The experiment results show that there is a good agreement between the reference sensor and smartphone measurements in both time and frequency domains.

Highlights

With the advances in sensor and computer technologies in the recent years, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has developed rapidly and has become a major research field in civil engineering, which provides a useful diagnostic tool for ensuring integrity and safety, detecting damage, and evaluating performance deterioration of civil infrastructures [1,2,3]
The SHM system installed on bridge provides realtime information for damage assessment after a disaster, not all bridges have been installed with the SHM system
Since the focus of this test is on the verification of feasibility of cable force measurement method using smartphone camera, the vibration data of the model cable acquired by Orion-CC and D-Viewer is analyzed using MATLAB

Summary

Introduction

With the advances in sensor and computer technologies in the recent years, Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has developed rapidly and has become a major research field in civil engineering, which provides a useful diagnostic tool for ensuring integrity and safety, detecting damage, and evaluating performance deterioration of civil infrastructures [1,2,3]. As can be seen from the above studies, the research of SHM based on smartphone has developed rapidly and received considerable attention from numerous countries It progresses from the previous single smartphone monitoring to multismartphones monitoring and from local monitoring to global data sharing, and the parameter has expanded from acceleration as traditional measuring parameter to multiparameters such as displacement and angle. The test results demonstrate the feasibility, accuracy, and reliability of bridge health monitoring method using smartphones

D-Viewer and Orion-CC

Vision-Based Cable Force Measuring Test

Smartphone-Based Structural Health

Conclusion