LIFE-CYCLE MONITORING AND MAINTENANCE OF BRIDGES: THE ROLE OF REMOTE SHM SYSTEMS

To minimise costs and inconveniences due to damage during the entire life-cycle of bridges, it is necessary to study in depth the causes of such damage. The standard methods of investigation and safety evaluation are sometimes insufficient, and the demand for improved information and better understanding continues to increase. Structural health monitoring (SHM), in particular, which can be used to measure high-frequency movements, accelerations, settlements, forces, etc., is being increasingly used for such purposes. SHM systems can provide very detailed information on structural behaviour and actual conditions, and enable uncertainties associated with material properties and structural capacity to be reduced. This paper presents recently installed automated SHM systems, demonstrating their usefulness and ease of use and the enormous gains in efficiency they offer over manual monitoring methods. One application relates to the monitoring of a number of bridges in a mining area in Australia. Due to the risk of ground settlements, it was decided that the structures should be remotely monitored by a permanent SHM system with an event notification feature to notify the responsible engineers should predefined threshold values be exceeded during ground settlements. As a result of the use of the SHM system, ground conditions have been confirmed to be stable on an ongoing basis, enabling the bridges to remain open to traffic – a typical benefit of SHM in the management and maintenance of bridges.