Overview of Bridge Health Monitoring

Abstract

Bridge operation safety is a key to national security and people’s livelihood. The importance and the urgency of bridge health monitoring and damage detection are introduced here. In the past, the health monitoring of bridges often relied on experienced engineers. They rely on their rich experience to detect and repair bridges. This method is inefficient and has low universality. Engineers can only detect and maintain the bridge they are familiar with. With the increasing importance of safety, durability and normal use of large bridges, the research and evaluation system of bridge health monitoring has been developed and achieved a wide range of achievements in the 20th century. This paper introduces the composition of the bridge health monitoring system. It consists of sensor subsystem, data acquisition and transmission subsystem, data processing and control subsystem. The key problems in sensor subsystem: sensor location optimization, data transmission mode and data processing method are also introduced. At the end, varies issues in existing systems and directions on the near future are analyzed and summarized.