Section: Application Domains

Civil Engineering

For at least three decades, monitoring the integrity of the civil infrastructure has been an active research topic because of major economical and societal issues, such as durability and safety of infrastructures, buildings and networks. Control of civil structures began a century ago. At stake is the mastering either the aging of the bridges, as in America (US, Canada) and Great Britain, or the resistance to seismic events and the protection of the cultural heritage, as in Italy and Greece. The research effort in France is very ancient since for example early developments of optical methods to monitor civil structures began in the 70s and SHM practice can be traced back to the 50s with the vibrating wire sensors as strain gauges for dams. Stille the number of sensors actually placed on civil structures is kept to a minimum, mainly for cost reasons, but also because the return on investment sensing and data processing technologies is not properly established for civil structures. One of the current thematic priorities of the C2D2 governmental initiative is devoted to construction monitoring and diagnostics. The picture in Asia (Japan, and also China) is somewhat different, in that recent or currently built bridges are equipped with hundreds if not thousands of sensors, in particular the Hong Kong-Shenzen Western Corridor and Stonecutter Bridge projects. However, the actual use of available data for operational purpose remains unclear.

Among the challenges for vibration-based bridges health monitoring, two major issues are the different kinds of (non measured) excitation sources and the environmental effects. Typically the traffic on and under the bridge, the wind and also the rain, contribute to excite the structure, and influence the measured dynamics. Moreover, the temperature is also known to affect the eigenfrequencies and mode-shapes, to an extent which can be significant w.r.t. the deviations to be monitored.

Thermomechanical prestress states affect the dynamic and the static behavior of most bridges, not only of very long and flexible ones. So, the reliable and fast determination of the state of prestress and prestrain associated with a temperature field becomes a crucial step in several engineering processes such as the health monitoring of civil structures. The best possible reconstruction of the temperature field could then become part of a complete process including massively distributed sensing of thermomechanical information on the structure, modeling and algorithms for the on-line detection of damages in the sense of abnormalities with regard to a nominal state, the whole chain being encapsulated in professional tools used by engineers in charge of real-life structural monitoring. For lack of an adequate mobilization of the useful multidisciplinary skills, this way remains about unexplored today.