ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: Deterioration mechanisms of a bridge due to numerous loading condition and various unanticipated loads highly complex. The most prevalent deterioration factors are not due to catastrophic events such as seismic disturbance and typhoons, but rather are due to natural phenomena such as aging, overload, fatigue, weather and settlement. These factors, which are hidden inside ‘the black box’, contribute to the long-term degradation of civil infrastructures. A reliable Structural Health Monitoring System (SHMS) should be derived to monitor the effect of these parameters on the integrity of such structures as distortion, deformation, stress change, crack propagation and corrosion progression. The long-term monitoring of structural deformational response will indicate structural degradation as a warning paradigm before catastrophic failure. Therefore, a smart bridge monitoring system that applies FODS (Fiber Optic Displacement Sensor) has been developed to monitor the global deformational behavior of bridge structural elements, such as, pier tilt, bearing anomalies, deck deflection and rotation due to live loads, environmental loads and long term pre-stress effects. By investigating field monitored results, it is confirmed that this real time monitoring system represents a reliable and economical approach to providing an early warning system for bridges.
