Experimental Verification of a Novel Accelerometer Intended for Structural Health Monitoring of Bridges

Bridges can be considered one of the most critical infrastructures of any country. Subsequently, their health state assessment is of great importance. However, durable monitoring of bridges can be highly costly and time-consuming. In addition, the current Structural Health Monitoring applications are only applicable to individual structures with a high budget for their health assessment. For a long-term economic evaluation of bridges, low-cost sensors are currently being developed for SHM applications. However, their resolution and accuracy are not yet suitable for structural system identifications. For that, a novel accelerometer based on Arduino technology is introduced in this work. Experiments show that this accelerometer has a better resolution. Illustrated test results of this paper on a frequency range of 0.5 to 8 Hz validate the performance of the proposed accelerometer.