SHM: Railroad bridge monitoring using Dragonfly® piezoelectric strain gauge
Abstract
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applied to civil structures such as bridges, high-rise towers, and electricity pylons can help plan their maintenance, detect damages or un-expected events, and extend their remaining operating lifetime. Typical sensors for this field have limitations in terms of sensitivity, drift, and reliability. Dragonfly® new piezoelectric strain gauges, with a resolution three order of magnitude over classic sensors, solve these issues and enable new applications.
This paper presents the implementation of Dragonfly® sensors on a railroad bridge. With a single sensor, it has been possible to identify the bridge girder first two resonance using ambient noise, train passage loading for fatigue-life analysis, train passage reproducibility, and pedestrian passage on the walkway. A complete comparison with classic strain gauge is detailed.
Key Words
Piezoelectric, Structural Health Monitoring, Bridge monitoring, Strain gauge, Fatigue-life, Event Detection