Structural Health Monitoring of a spread prestressed concrete slab beam bridge
Applications
Location: Houston (Texas) , USA
Site monitored since: December 2017
DESCRIPTION OF THE STRUCTURE AND OVERALL TASKS
BeanAir GmbH and Ensyso Corp. entered a partnership to demonstrate their expertise, know-how and most recent technological capabilities via performing a structural health monitoring technology demonstration test which was performed at Texas A&M University’s Riverside Campus.The bridge was recently built as part of a high budget research effort performed in cooperation with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).
The objective of the research was to explore the use of slab beams that are used in a spread configuration for short span bridges and to provide appropriate design recommendations.
The test structure is a simply supported bridge which was designed and built at the edge of a runway located at the Texas A&M University Riverside Campus. It has a 46 ft 7 in. span length (from center to center of the bearing pads) and an overall width of 34 ft .The bridge superstructure has four slab beam girders spaced at 4 ft 8 in. clear spacing with prestressed concrete panels (PCPs) between the slab beams as stay-in-place (SIP) forms. The slab beam girders are standard TxDOT 5SB15 slab beams. The 4 in. thick PCPsare 8 ft long and have an overall width of 5 ft 4 in. The cast-in-place (CIP) deck thickness varies slightly along the length to accommodate the camber of the prestressed slab beams.
Slab beam girders were instrumented with wireless accelerometers, with a range of ±2g. Collected test data were compared with the ones obtained via Finite Element Analysis (FEA) following the completion of the testing activities Structure was excited with a loaded truck.
Wireless accelerometer were used with a sampling rate of 10Hz up to 100Hz.
Caption 1: Location of Bridge Site
Caption 3: Riverside Bridge – Top View
Caption 5: Riverside Bridge – View of the Slab Beams with Cables used for Instrumentation
Caption 2: Riverside Bridge Superstructure
Caption 4: Riverside Bridge – Side View
Caption 6: Riverside Bridge – View of the Bearing Pads
EQUIPMENT USED
Ultra-Low-Power WIFI Vibration Sensor | built-in datalogger | MQTT Protocol Communication
Caption 7: Finite Element Model of the Riverside Bridge
Caption 8: Second Bending Mode of the Riverside Bridge (8.3 Hz)
Caption 9: First Bending Mode of the Riverside Bridge (5.8 Hz)
Caption 10: Third Bending Mode of the Riverside Bridge (14.5 Hz)
Caption 11: Truck used to generate excitation on structure
Caption 12: Deployment of 10 wireless vibration sensors (Ref: BeanDevice® Wilow® AX-3D ±2g)
Caption 13: Vibration activity is collected on BeanScape® Wilow® software
Caption 15: Overview of wireless accelerometers on the slab beams
Caption 16: Wireless IIOT sensors configuration before deployment
Caption 14: Wireless vibration sensors mounted with screws
About our partner Ensyso Corp
Ensyso Corp. is a independent engineering company that provides professional engineering services and consultancy in several areas including global and local analysis of structural and mechanical systems, dynamic simulations and vibration and damage assessment. Ensyso has developed a non-destructive damage evaluation (NDE) methodology which can detect the location and severity of damage on structures using vibration information (e.g., acceleration, strain, displacement).
Visit their website: www.ensyso.com