The Development of a Smart Sensing System for Bridge Health Monitoring

The Development of a Smart Sensing System for Bridge Health Monitoring

Bridges are very important types of infrastructure that connect communication and transportation between cities. In recent years, torrential rain has induced damage to the structural safety of cross-river bridges; therefore, health monitoring and damage detection of bridges is of utmost importance. A pioneering step in the study of this issue is to collect and observe structural response signals under different environmental conditions. A flexible sensing solution is required to provide an effective and robust way to collect the structural response of bridges under harsh climate conditions. The objective of this paper is to develop a Smart Sensing System to provide a flexible sensing solution for bridge health monitoring. The Smart Sensing System was developed to fulfill the requirements of bridge health monitoring, which include 1) a flexible and reliable data transmission in a field environment; 2) autonomous and long-term measurement under harsh climates; 3) high sensitivity signal sampling to extract structural ambient responses; 4) on-site signal processing and analysis. The performance of the Smart Sensing System was examined during a field experiment at Niudou Bridge during the FANAPI typhoon period.