Structural health monitoring system of Ironton-Russell bridge during substructure construction

Abstract

Monitoring a complex structure has gained popularity worldwide to ensure safety and longevity of the structure. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems have been employed for highway bridges to increase the effectiveness of their in-service inspection, to help measure its degradation or damage, and hence, to ensure it’s safe and reliable operation. SHM may also be employed during the construction of a structure in order to ensure the safety and performance of the construction process. Monitoring during construction can also help designers compare the actual behavior of a structure with design models especially because of increasing development of accelerated or otherwise novel construction techniques. Analyzing the behavior of a structure at different stages of construction may also help later define some of the abnormal responses during the lifespan of a bridge. This paper overviews the SHM system of the Ironton-Russell Bridge, Ohio at the construction stage of its substructure. The stages involved in monitoring such as instrumentation of sensors, acquiring data from the sensors, data processing that includes a warning system, static analysis of the data collected and website are detailed in this paper. In addition to this, the effect of construction events as observed by the sensor data for the substructure is analyzed in detail thus validating the capability of the monitoring system. © (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.