Latest Advances in Smart Components and Monitoring for Civil Structures
Abstract
Rapid technical advances and the increasing demand for long design lives of civil structures
of any kind make Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) increasingly popular for owners
and designers for the valuable information it provides about structural performance. SHM
offers a wide range of benefits including increased service life, improved maintenance
planning, construction optimization, and risk minimization. For example, it can be used
to verify design assumptions or to provide actual measurements in advance of upgrading
and repair work. Depending on the objective to be achieved by SHM on any particular
structure, systems can be simple and "portable", or sophisticated and comprehensive.
SHM can be especially efficient and useful when the sensors that measure data are preintegrated
in the design and fabrication of a bridge's key components - in particular,
its bearings, expansion joints and dampers/shock transmission units. The benefits are
further enhanced by ongoing developments in the communication technologies used to
transmit data from the sensors on the bridge to the user's online interface. This paper
briefly illustrates the use of this modern technology on bridges in Qatar, Switzerland,
Norway, Canada, and India.