Aeroelastic monitoring system: A part of long-span bridge structural health monitoring system

Wind-flow around a long-span bridge, as a bluff body, will generate an aerodynamic force that interacts with the flow, causing vibration to the bridge deck. This phenomenon can lead to structural fatigue or worst, the bridge collapse. A continuous and comprehensive measurement system is needed for early detection and maintenance reference of a long-span bridge. Another benefit this system is aiming at maintaining the bridge design validation and getting development recommendation for subsequent structure. A comprehensive structural health monitoring system can be built based on data from continuous measurement and analysis of other loads such as seismic activities, traffic load, waves, self-weight of structure, earth pressure, corrosion, temperature, and so on. Some experiments have been conducted by National Laboratory of Aerodynamic, Aeroelastic and Aeroacoustic Technology's research team, which resulted in a long-span bridges aeroelastic monitoring system prototype. The prototype, called BAMS x1, can acquire wind direction, wind speed and vertical acceleration (heaving) data of a long-span bridge. A National Instrument based embedded data acquisition hardware is used. A stand-alone measurement system in remote location (based on Lab VIEW Web Service) can be build, and it is sending the data package to the server every 10 s period. At the server side, some data management and processing are done to prepare the data to the next level of analysis processing. Further development will be conducted to supply advanced data, accessible to all over the world through web application.