Passive Structural Health Monitoring of Connecticut’s Bridge Infrastructure

This paper reports on a long-term bridge monitoring program in Connecticut. Monitoring systems have been designed and installed on a series of different bridges, beginning in 1999. Ambient data are collected from normal traffic, using strain gauges, accelerometers, tiltmeters, and thermocouples. This paper discusses three of the monitored bridges, demonstrating the benefits of using long-term monitoring systems to provide information on the structural performance that is useful both to those responsible for the bridge infrastructure and to researchers interested in bridge monitoring. The extensive data developed from multiyear monitoring have been used to create benchmarks for passive structural health monitoring for each of the three bridges. Relationships and trends discovered for each of the bridges, used for the creation of the benchmarks, and stored in a database, are discussed.