Developments for Structural Health Monitoring of Transportation Infrastructure

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It is widely accepted by researchers, officials and practitioners in Canada and all around the world that aging civil infrastructure systems are among the most significant challenges faced by our society. There is a considerable effort to restore and improve these systems with a long-term goal of developing a sustainable infrastructure system. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is considered to be one of the most critical components of this long-term goal as an objective and innovative decision-making support tool for infrastructure owners and decision-makers. SHM is the employment of sensing technologies for measuring the responses of a structure along with the operating and loading environment to track and evaluate its performance for safety and serviceability. Recent advances in sensing technologies enable easy data collection; however, proper and efficient analysis of the measured data still stands as a major challenge before routine SHM applications. Therefore, the main objective of the proposed research program is to investigate and develop novel data analysis techniques for damage detection and performance evaluation of civil infrastructure systems, with a special emphasis on bridges. One of the focus areas will be the development of statistical pattern recognition based damage detection methodologies and fine-tuning these methodologies for automated long-term monitoring of bridges. As bridges are subject to changing environmental and operational conditions, the effect of the damage on the data may be masked by these daily, seasonal and yearly changes. Considering the severe weather conditions in Canada, environmental changes may even have larger impacts. Therefore, the second major component of this research will focus on eliminating the uncertainties in the SHM data caused by the environmental and operational effects. After the development, these methodologies will be tested with laboratory and field experiments. The outcomes of this research are expected to help Canadian infrastructure agencies with the management of infrastructure systems not only to increase their safety and reliability but also to optimize maintenance operations during their service life, offering significant savings in life cycle cost.