A Bridge Structural Health Monitoring and Data Mining System

Overview

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is becoming a more widely accepted way to improve bridge management. Off late, a fiber optic SHM system was developed and deployed by the Iowa State University Bridge Engineering Center to continuously monitor bridge performance under ambient traffic loads and to detect potential gradual deterioration or sudden damage, specifically for Iowa's fracture-critical bridges. Strain time history data collected by this system were utilized to construct a baseline model that is based upon extreme-matching distribution. In this paper, the SHM system, relevant autonomous data mining results, and numerical verification are presented. Moreover, ongoing efforts in estimating the truck geometry/type, weight, and velocity are described.