Monitoring of Road Structures – Real Time Acquisition and Control of Data

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.