Structural health monitoring of a cable-stayed bridge using smart sensor technology: deployment and evaluation

TLDR

Structural health monitoring of civil infrastructure with wireless smart sensor networks has attracted significant attention due to their low cost, ease of installation, and efficient on‑board data management. The study reports the deployment and evaluation of a state‑of‑the‑art wireless smart sensor network on the 344‑m Jindo cable‑stayed bridge in South Korea. The network comprised 70 Imote2 sensor nodes with custom multimetric boards, two base stations, and ISHMP software, autonomously triggered by wind or vibration, and its performance was assessed for hardware durability, software stability, power use, and energy harvesting. The deployment, the largest of its kind to date, demonstrates the strong potential of wireless smart sensor networks for large‑scale civil infrastructure monitoring.

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) of civil infrastructure using wireless smart sensor networks (WSSNs) has received significant public attention in recent years. The benefits of WSSNs are that they are low-cost, easy to install, and provide effective data management via on-board computation. This paper reports on the deployment and evaluation of a state-of-the-art WSSN on the new Jindo Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge in South Korea with a 344-m main span and two 70-m side spans. The central components of the WSSN deployment are the Imote2 smart sensor platforms, a custom-designed multimetric sensor boards, base stations, and software provided by the Illinois Structural Health Monitoring Project (ISHMP) Services Toolsuite. In total, 70 sensor nodes and two base stations have been deployed to monitor the bridge using an autonomous SHM application with excessive wind and vibration triggering the system to initiate monitoring. Additionally, the performance of the system is evaluated in terms of hardware durability, software stability, power consumption and energy harvesting capabilities. The Jindo Bridge SHM system constitutes the largest deployment of wireless smart sensors for civil infrastructure monitoring to date. This deployment demonstrates the strong potential of WSSNs for monitoring of large scale civil infrastructure.