Satellite InSAR technology for structural health monitoring of road bridges and the surrounding territory: a case study

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of satellite Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of road bridges. While many road bridges worldwide are over half a century old and exhibit widespread deterioration, traditional contact-type sensors for SHM are installed only on a few structures, mainly due to their high cost. In recent years, remote sensing techniques, such as satellite InSAR technology, have been explored to overcome these limitations. This paper focuses on the displacements of the Po River Bridge, which is part of the Italian A22 Highway. We extract the bridge’s displacement with Multi-Temporal InSAR data processing using SAR images acquired by the Italian Cosmo-SkyMed mission. We study 8 years of displacement time series of reflective targets, Persistent Scatterers, naturally visible on the bridge without installing any instrumentation on site. We perform an exploratory analysis of the displacements of the entire area through the K-means clustering algorithms and investigate the correlation between the bridge displacements and environmental phenomena (variation of air temperature and river water flow). The results confirm the potential of satellite InSAR technology for the remote monitoring of road bridges and their surrounding area. However, they also highlight the need for a metrological validation of such technology through a direct comparison with measurements from traditional and already validated SHM systems.