Developing TRACKER - Portable Monitoring System using Kalman Filtering to Track Rotational Movement of Bridges

我们已建成的基础设施对极端天气事件的脆弱性及其对我们社会和经济的巨大影响，最近在英国西南部2013/14年冬季的暴风雨中突显出来，当时道利什海堤的故障导致连接西南部和英国其他地区的主要铁路线关闭了近两个月。在此期间，由于通勤交通的突然增加，周围的道路出现了混乱，导致埃克塞特以西地区与英国其他地区之间的旅行时间明显延长。网络中断对企业和当地社区造成的经济损失估计接近5亿GB，旅游业等某些部门的损失远远超过了线路关闭的时间。因此，增强建筑环境对极端天气事件的弹性已成为政策制定者和基础设施资产所有者的主要优先事项，也是一项艰巨的工程挑战，这从ICE的2014年国情和交通弹性评论等最近的出版物中可见一斑。确定极端天气事件对任何基础设施资产的影响的一个主要障碍是，目前既无法衡量环境负荷，也无法衡量负荷对建成结构状况的影响。因此，对资产状况的任何事后估计基本上是基于将估计的环境负荷应用于假定代表资产结构性能的近似数值模型的结果。这种方法是非常不可靠的，因为实际荷载和建成后结构的响应可能并经常与假设值非常不同。该项目旨在通过直接测量环境荷载和结构对经验力的响应来消除对这种评估技术的需要。该项目将建立在研究组在监测全尺寸结构和解释结构性能评估测量方面的丰富经验的基础上。它将侧重于测量地面基础设施可能经历的极端天气力的影响，包括风荷载、雪荷载、洪水和潮汐/波浪荷载的水动力以及热效应。它还将制定仪器概念，以便最佳部署传感器，以捕捉极端天气事件期间的结构反应，并开发数据解释工具，以评估资产的性能。

The vulnerability of our built infrastructure to extreme weather events and its tremendous impacts on our society and economy was brought to the fore most recently by the storms of winter 2013/14 in the southwest of UK when the failure of the Dawlish seawall caused the main railway line linking the southwest to the rest of the UK to be closed for nearly two months. During this period, there was chaos on the surrounding roads due to a sudden increase in commuter traffic, leading to significantly longer journey times between the regions to the west of Exeter and the rest of UK. The economic costs of the network disruptions to businesses and local communities were estimated to be nearly £500 million with losses in certain sectors such as tourism extending well beyond the period of line closure. Consequently enhancing the resilience of our built environment to extreme weather events has been highlighted as a major priority and also a difficult engineering challenge by policy makers and infrastructure asset owners, as evident from recent publications such as the ICE's state-of-the-nation 2014 and Transport resilience review.A major obstacle to characterizing the impact of an extreme weather event on any infrastructure asset is the current inability to measure neither the environmental loading nor the impact of the loading on the as-built structure's condition. Hence, any post-event estimate of an asset's condition is based essentially on results from applying estimated environmental loads to approximate numerical models assumed to be representative of the asset's structural performance. This approach is highly unreliable as both the real loading and the response of the as-built structure may be and is often very different to assumed values. This project aims to eliminate the need for such assessment techniques by measuring directly both the environmental loading and the structure's response to experienced forces. The project will build on the extensive experience in the research group in monitoring full-scale structures, and in interpreting measurements for structural performance assessment. It will focus on measurement of effects of the extreme weather forces that can be experienced by above-ground infrastructure including extreme effects from: wind loads, snow loads, hydrodynamic forces from flooding and tidal/wave loads and thermal effects. It will also develop instrumentation concepts for optimal deployment of sensors for capturing structural response during extreme weather events, and the data interpretation tools to assess performance of assets.