Abstract:
The growing socio-economical importance of roads and of their structures and infrastructures, together with the most recent technological advances, encourage the development of structural health monitoring systems that, to be effective, must acquire relevant data continuously and autonomously making it available on-line or
in appropriate databases. If these systems are also capable of processing data in real time and set off alarms based on the quantities acquired, they can be used to control the safety and may give an important contribution to the maintenance of structures such as bridges and tunnels, and infrastructures such as road embankments and slopes.
This work presents a system with these capabilities, developed at LNEC, which can
be applied to control the safety and maintenance of road structures and
infrastructures.
After a short general description of this system, several aspects are focused, such
as the control of networks of the data acquisition systems, the automatic
transmission, the real time removal of erroneous values, the alarm triggering and
the processes of acceptance, identification and storage of data.
Finally this work refers the installation of the system developed, in several railway
and road bridges, located in Portugal. The installation of this system in several
structures has given an important contribution to its development.
