ABSTRACT
China is a country with many wide rivers and canyons as well as a long coastline. In order to satisfy the increasing requirements of the traffic, Chinese government has invested a lot in the long-span bridges in the last two decades. Among them, many projects are world-class super projects, such as Sutong Bridge, Stonecutters Bridge and Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge.
To ensure normal operation of the traffic, a lot of money is spent on the maintenance of these bridges each year. Bridge damages detected during the maintenance are usually identified by manual inspection, which is later proven to be insufficient. To overcome the shortcomings of the manual inspection, bridge health monitoring system is introduced, which has significant advantages in data continuity and synchronization and can measure the key parameters which are very difficult to obtain by manual inspection.
In this paper, several problems in bridge health monitoring in recent years are analyzed. Usual monitoring projects in China are summarized based on three categories, loads, structural response, and environment parameters; the motivations of each monitoring project are summarized; and regularly used equipment is introduced.
Four main functions of the bridge monitoring system are classified and introduced in detail, namely the real-time risk alert, historical data statistic and analysis, bridge specialized monitoring, and bridge specialized assessment. A flowchart illustrating the working procedures of a normal bridge health monitoring system is provided in Figure 1. Flowchart of health monitoring system. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315207681/cd556cd4-4dcf-4efe-8e29-56fc67b8bfbd/content/fig96_1.tif"/>
The development trends in the future of bridge health monitoring systems are pointed out on the base of the related research progress in recent years. It is expected that the application of mobile internet technology, maintenance based on 3D visualized technology and regional bridge maintenance platform will create a better future for the bridge health monitoring system to maintain public safety.
