Thermal deformation monitoring of a highway bridge: combined analysis of geodetic and satellite-based InSAR measurements with structural simulations

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of civil engineering structures is experiencing an increasing progress in the last decades. The present work focuses on the static behavior of a highway bridge due to environmental temperature effects. The goal of the present study was to test the applicability of the satellite-based synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) for deformation monitoring of a large, curved highway bridge and to compare the obtained results with alternative measurement techniques like classical geodesy surveying and with an advanced computer simulation. Such a comparison is quite rare and provides an important insight into the accuracy, efficiency and limitations of the InSAR technique in the context of SHM. Especially interesting was the question whether the InSAR technique is suitable for blind monitoring of a cluster of bridges in the region of interest. The present study shows that a pre-knowledge about each structure can be very important for a reliable interpretation of the InSAR measurement results. The second challenge of the study was to overcome several objective difficulties of combining and comparing quite different monitoring techniques that result from different sampling rates, measurement points and other specific features and sensitivities. Nevertheless, a suitable approach has been developed and implemented in the present study for the InSAR and total station measurements, providing new results and important knowledge about novel SHM techniques.