Vibration testing of a steel girder bridge using cabled and wireless sensors

Abstract

Being able to significantly reduce system installation time and cost, wireless sensing technology has attracted much interest in the structural health monitoring (SHM) community. This paper reports the field application of a wireless sensing system on a 4-span highway bridge located in Wayne, New Jersey in the US. Bridge vibration due to traffic and ambient excitation is measured. To enhance the signal-to-noise ratio, a low-noise high-gain signal conditioning module is developed for the wireless sensing system. Nineteen wireless and nineteen cabled accelerometers are first installed along the sidewalk of two neighboring bridge spans. The performance of the wireless sensing system is compared with the high-precision cabled sensing system. In the next series of testing, 16 wireless accelerometers are installed under the deck of another bridge span, forming a 4 × 4 array. Operating deflection analysis is successfully conducted using the wireless measurement of traffic and ambient vibrations.

Keywords

wireless sensing / structural health monitoring (SHM) / signal conditioning / operating deflection analysis / ambient vibration

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Acknowledgments

This research is partially sponsored by the National Science Foundation, under grant number CMMI-0928095 (Program Manager: Dr. Shih-Chi Liu). The authors appreciate the generous assistance with the field testing provided by researchers from Drexel University, including Prof. Franklin L. Moon, Prof. A. Emin Aktan, Dr. Yun Zhou, Mr. John Prader, Mr. Jeff Weidner, among others. In addition, the authors appreciate the help with the Narada wireless sensing units from Prof. Jerome P. Lynch and Dr. Andrew T. Zimmerman of the University of Michigan, as well as Prof. R. Andrew Swartz of Michigan Technological University.

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