An Experimental Study on the Monitoring of Wire Breaks in Bridge Cables

Bridge cables are important safety components of long-span cable bridges. What’s more, how to exactly figure out broken wires in cables really matters in bridge structural health monitoring. This paper, which simulates wire breaks by releasing the steel strands one by one on the funicular machine, collates and analyzes the broken wires’ experimental data. In this process, we used fiber Bragg grating sensor (FBGS) and the metal strain gauges for data acquisition, as well as MATLAB for the polynomial curve fitting of the experimental data. The results show that the shape of the broken wires’ calibration curves is basically the same as the strain calibration curves. Based on calibration curves, engineers can determine the necessity of cable replacement by estimating the quantity of broken wires. This paper provides an effective technologic solution to detect broken wires in bridge cables accurately.