Development and Field Validation of Wireless Sensors for Railway Bridge Modal Identification

Abstract

Bridges are strategic infrastructures which are subject to degradation during their lifetime. Therefore, structural health monitoring is becoming an essential tool in this field to drive maintenance activities. Conventional vibration monitoring systems relying on wired sensors present several limitations for continuous monitoring projects on a huge number of structures. In this work, a smart wireless monitoring system is developed for bridge modal identification with the aim of providing an alternative tool to wired sensors in this field. The main peculiarities of the designed wireless accelerometers are the low cost, the ease of installation on the structure, and the long-term autonomy granted by the use of energy harvesting techniques. To assess their measurement performance, some prototypes were installed for a field test on a railway bridge and significant data were acquired. Through the processing of the collected data, bridge main natural frequencies were estimated, and their values were in good agreement with the reference ones obtained with a conventional system. The assessment of the developed solution paves the way to the instrumentation of many bridges with the aim of performing continuous monitoring activities using simple diagnostic indicators, such as the variation of frequencies in time.

Developing and Testing High-Performance SHM Sensors Mounting Low-Noise MEMS Accelerometers

“…They used that sensor board with commercial WSN motes produced by Crossbow Technology running TinyOS, an open-source, BSD-licensed operating system designed for low-power, low-data rate wireless devices. Zanelli et al [ 19 ] proposed a wireless sensor node relying on an energy harvesting technique to guarantee long-term monitoring capability.…”

Experimental Investigation on the Transfer Behavior and Environmental Influences of Low-Noise Integrated Electronic Piezoelectric Acceleration Sensors

“…DC-coupled MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) sensors have often been used in the low-frequency range due to their linear response in this range and their capability to measure constant accelerations, such as gravity [17]. For example, in [18], Zanelli et al developed a monitoring system for bridge mode identification using wireless MEMS sensors as an alternative to wired MEMS sensors. To evaluate the sensor performance, some prototypes were installed on a railway bridge for a field test and data were collected showing the low-frequency system behavior of the bridge.…”

Wireless Strain Gauge for Monitoring Bituminous Pavements

“…With the progress made in recent years on wave transmission technologies, wireless sensors are increasingly used in the monitoring of engineering structures, such as bridges [12], buildings, railways [13,14], or road structures [3,15]. Many articles deal with their use in the dynamic and vibration fields [16][17][18] as well as in fatigue or damage problems [19,20], detection of the presence of humidity [21], or even vehicle detection and counting [22,23].…”