Damage Detection of Bridge using Wireless Sensors

Bridges are essential links in any surface transportation network. A damage to an important bridge may result in enduring economic loss due to partial or complete closure of the route in addition to the cost of repair or replacement. Also, survival of bridges are of utmost importance in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in order to facilitate rescue operations. Therefore, it has become customary to carry out a critical assessment of safety and integrity of bridges in regular intervals as well as immediately after disastrous events such as an earthquake. The prevalent practice of bridge inspection requires checking of each and every component, which is experience-based, highly time consuming and an expensive process, often enforcing disruption in traffic flow. As a result, the wireless sensor-based inspection methodology is gaining popularity in recent times. This paper a presents a study to show the efficiency of a multi-hopped wireless sensor network (WSN) for remote health monitoring of bridge. Various vibration-based and feature-based output-only damage detection techniques are applied to show their efficacy in terms of determining the location and severity of damages using the data collected from the bridge under damaged and undamaged conditions.