Real time structural health monitoring and performance assessments of bridges

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Most aging bridges -when tested- are found to have sufficient structural capacity. With the use of ongoing monitoring to ensure safety and operational capacity, the useful life of these structures can be extended. The residual service life and condition assessment of bridges is estimated by installing structural health monitoring (SHM) system and analyzing the results. Intelligent Structures Canada is a Canadian corporation which offers instrumentation and services for the monitoring of civil structures such as bridges and have instrumented several bridges in Canada. State of the art cloud based data archiving is used to store the data streamed from the bridges. Currently, limited analytic tools are available in the company. Development of data analysis tools is an important part of the development of the company. **This project will focus on developing algorithms and analytic tools that can robustly use real time live load structural response to assess the health of the structure. In this project, an installation of a real time SHM including strain gauges, temperature sensors , accelerometer, and tilt sensors with real time cellular data transmission on bridges will be conducted. The data will be stored in databases. Data analysis will be conducted using novel data processing techniques and visualization tools to extract the needed information about the condition of the structures. SHM software and analytic tools will be also developed to automate the analysis procedure as well as automate reporting the assessment of the bridges. The research project will study two categories of bridges in detail: (a) pony truss bridges, which constitute the lower end of the reliability spectrum, and (b) bridges with several steel girders, which represent the higher end of the reliability spectrum. The development of comprehensive software to evaluate the ultimate load carrying capacity of pony truss and steel girder bridges will help the company to provide higher, yet safe, estimates of the load carrying capacities of these bridges. The provided set of analytics tools will result in more effective and productive use of the bridge assets of Canada. **During the development process, the research team and company will work closely together and take feedback on the company's view and decisions about different ideas and implementation of the research and resulting software. By the end of this project, the analytical tools will be used to evaluate several existing bridges.**