Bridge Health Monitoring via Displacement Reconstruction-Based NB-IoT Technology

An aged bridge’s performance is affected by degradation and becomes one of the major concerns in maintenance. A preliminary, simple and workable procedure of bridge damage detection is required to minimize maintenance costs. In the past, frequency is one of the most common indicators to detect damage occurrence. Recent research found that using frequency as a health indicator still has room to improve. Alternatively, dynamic displacement is used as an indicator in the current study. These dynamic displacements are reconstructed based on measured acceleration records from micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) sensors. The Newmark-beta method with Windows is proposed to acquire the reconstructed displacements of considered bridges. To demonstrate the accuracy and applicability of the proposed approach, three different experiments are carried out; (i) A small scale bridge with the implementation of MEMS acceleration sensors; (ii) a numerical complex finite element method (FEM) bridge model; (iii) an actual bridge with the implementation of MEMS acceleration sensors and narrow bandwidth Internet of things (NB-IoT) technology. The first experiment shows that the proposed method can successfully identify the difference between damaged/undamaged bridges and determine damage location. The second experiment indicates that the proposed method is able to identify the difference between stiffened/unstiffened bridges. The last experiment shows the applicability of the proposed method on an actual bridge health monitoring project.