Long-term performance assessment of the Telegraph Road Bridge using a permanent wireless monitoring system and automated statistical process control analytics

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The purpose of this study is to advance wireless sensing technology for permanent installation in operational highway bridges for long-term automated health assessment. The work advances the design of a solar-powered wireless sensor network architecture that can be permanently deployed in harsh winter climates where limited solar energy and cold temperatures are normal operational conditions. To demonstrate the performance of the solar-powered wireless sensor network, it is installed on the multi-steel girder bridge carrying northbound I-275 traffic over Telegraph Road (Monroe, Michigan) in 2011; a unique design feature of the bridge is the use of pin and hanger connections to support the bridge main span. A dense network of strain gauges, accelerometers and thermometers are installed to acquire bridge responses of interest to the bridge manager including responses that would be affected by long-term bridge deterioration. The wireless monitoring system collects sensor data on a daily schedule and communicates the data to the Internet where it is stored in a curated data repository. Bridge response data in the repository are autonomously processed to extract truck load events using machine learning, compensate for environmental variations using nonlinear regression and to quantitatively assess anomalous bridge performance using statistical process control.