Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Bridges play a critical role for the transportation systems in the United States. There are more than 590,000 highway bridges and 100,000 railroad bridges in the United States. Many of those bridges are 50 years old and they are still in use. Collapse of I-35W Mississippi River bridge was a wake-up call for U.S. to ensure the safe operation of this brdige network.

This project seeks to develop a low-cost wireless sensing system that will facilitate a long-term health monitoring focusing on a number of structural metrics. Initially, the sensor system will use accelerations captured with low-cost acceleroemeters (MMA8452 or ADXL345) and displacements derived from recorded accelerations to assess the quality of the bridges. The ultimate goal of this project is informing brdige owners (federal/state/industry) about the quality of bridges to prevent catastrophes.