Monitoring Instrumentation and Techniques: Sustainable Bridges Background document D5.1

In a near future, monitoring has the potential to become a useful instrument for improving the efficiency of maintenance of civil engineering structures. However, monitoring is the domainof specialists in sensor technology, electronics, informatics as well as data communication and processing. All these topics are usually not familiar to all those civil engineers responsiblefor the maintenance and upgrading of civil structures. On the other hand, when implementing a monitoring system, civil engineers have to cooperate very closely with monitoring specialists to assure that the monitoring system designed by these specialists provides the information that they are looking for. Usually, this is not for granted. Therefore, the scope of this report is to give civil engineers an insight into the most common concepts and technologies in use today for monitoring of civil engineering structures. A better understanding of the opportunities and limitations of these techniques helps to improve the communication between civil engineers and monitoring specialists and, as a consequence, contributes to provide better designed monitoring systems fitting as good as possible the requirements formulated by the customer and civil engineers. This report tries to fill this gap and describes the most common monitoring concepts and techniques that are available today. It is a background document of the monitoring guidelinesSB-5.2 “Monitoring Guidelines for Railway Bridges”. It will collect all technical information concerning measurement instrumentation which is required for a proper understanding of guidelines.