Sensing and Information Extraction for Bridge Structural Health Monitoring

The failure or sudden closure of a bridge can cause transport chaos, e.g. closure of Forth Road Bridge in December 2015 caused massive disruption. The transport networks of the future must be robust against these kinds of shock events. More recently, The Morandi bridge collapse in Geona in 2018 (43 fatalities) has further emphasised the urgent need for more effective bridge management/monitoring. Budget constraints, however, mean significant extra investment is unlikely, and so innovative approaches are needed to address the challenge. The impact of this project will be to contribute toward overcoming this challenge.
The aim of this project is to develop condition monitoring techniques that can contribute to avoid the above type of events occurring. The project will look at identifying the condition of the bridge by monitoring its response to external factors (e.g. vehicle load, or temperature). Within the overall aim, the project has objectives on (i) sensing and data collection and (ii) data interpretation. The challenges with (i) is that bridges are large structures, often with no electrical power or external communication capability. Therefore, collecting relevant data in a cost effective manner is challenging. For (ii) the issue is that even when data is available, that data needs to be refined/processed to produce information useful for decision support.
Following from objectives (i) and (ii) the research methodology for this project is to look at how existing sensors can be used in novel ways to extract useful information from bridges with a particular emphasis on remaining mindful of the needs of the end user which, in this case, is often the bridge owner and/or road operator. As a number of different sensing options are currently available, the project will investigate a number of different bridge responses e.g. acceleration or displacement and environmental factors such as temperature. As well looking at bridges individually, the potential to use a frame work to look at them collectively will be investigated.
This project is strongly aligned to the EPSRC research area on Structural Engineering, and, to a lesser extent, Infrastructure & Urban Systems. This project is in keeping with the EPSRC strategy of delivering economic impact and social prosperity as it looks to contribute to low cost damage detection systems for public infrastructure, namely bridges, and as a result, would allow for early intervention and for preventative maintenance to be carried out, reducing the number of abrupt closures to road networks.