Monimost - Integrated SHM System for Railway Truss Bridges

A railway bridge has been the object of investigation since mid 2007 as a response to increasing interest in structural health monitoring (SHM) from Polish Railways. It is a typical 40 m long, steel truss structure spanning a channel in Nieporet near Warsaw. There is over 1500 similar bridges in the railway network in Poland. The integrated system consists of two components weigh in motion (WIM) part for identification of train load and SHM part for assessing the state of the bridge. Two aspects of wireless transmission are considered short range (in the vicinity of the bridge, 2.4GHz) and far range (from the bridge to the data analysis center, GSM). The system is designed to be energetically self-sufficient, batteries are recharged by solar panels. Both the subsystems use piezoelectric strain sensors. Numerical model of the bridge corresponds well to the experimental data and provides a good starting point for considering different scenarios of simulated damage in the structure.