Full Scale Experiment on Bridge

James Garrett, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a major concern for Bridge Authorities. In the aftermath of the 2007 I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse in Minneapolis, a 2010 U.S. Department of Transportation report rated 26% of the country's nearly 600,000 bridges either structurally deficient or "functionally obsolete". Since then, the search for reliable structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies able to prevent catastrophic failures or to flag early signs of early deterioration became a top priority.

To date, besides mandatory visual inspection, the SHM of bridges is conducted using direct approaches where sensors are deployed in the structure and measurements are streamed to a centralized unit for data cleansing, feature extraction and classification, to provide diagnostics. This approach faces several practical problems and great direct and maintenance costs

We have been working on a paradigm shifting approach for indirect monitoring. This approach has the advantages of decentralizing the monitoring apparatus to fleets of vehicles that can continuously store or send data. The objective is cost-effective and sustainable assessments of a large population of bridges.

Source: www.maps.google.com

Objective: Obtain full scale experiment vehicle-bridge interaction data to evaluate detection capability of signal processing algorithms under different structural scenarios.

Current state: bridge is open to traffic with no restrictions
Research interest:  Detection of various damage state conditions.
Opportunity: 20 mins drive form CMU campus.

Experiment description:

The experiment considers an instrumented vehicle with accelerometers running over the girder bridge structure. The vehicle should run at a fixed velocity while crossing the main bridge span. Possible scenarios consider evaluating the influence the ongoing traffic or additional. The use of a heavy load truck will enable the simulation of different combinations. For example: Light vehicle running after heavy truck, light vehicle running with heavy truck placed on bridge deck without moving, light vehicle placed on the bridge as heavy vehicle passes by.

If interested, please contact Professors Jim Garrett (garrett@cmu.edu) and
Jacobo Bielak in CEE to get more details.