Long-Term Structural Health Monitoring System for a High-Speed Railway Bridge Structure

Nanjing Dashengguan Bridge, which serves as the shared corridor crossing Yangtze River for both Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway and Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu railway, is the first 6-track high-speed railway bridge with the longest span throughout the world. In order to ensure safety and detect the performance deterioration during the long-time service of the bridge, a Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system has been implemented on this bridge by the application of modern techniques in sensing, testing, computing, and network communication. The SHM system includes various sensors as well as corresponding data acquisition and transmission equipment for automatic data collection. Furthermore, an evaluation system of structural safety has been developed for the real-time condition assessment of this bridge. The mathematical correlation models describing the overall structural behavior of the bridge can be obtained with the support of the health monitoring system, which includes cross-correlation models for accelerations, correlation models between temperature and static strains of steel truss arch, and correlation models between temperature and longitudinal displacements of piers. Some evaluation results using the mean value control chart based on mathematical correlation models are presented in this paper to show the effectiveness of this SHM system in detecting the bridge's abnormal behaviors under the varying environmental conditions such as high-speed trains and environmental temperature.