Monitoring System Design for Shanghai Yangtze River Bridge under Extreme Environmental Condition

Recent engineering applications on health monitoring of large span bridge structures show that although hundreds of sensors were installed and a great amount of data were collected daily from the monitoring system, it is still of great difficulties to assess structural physical condition and operational performance as well as to make valuable conclusions to instruct bridge management and maintenance. This made the value of a bridge monitoring system is still ambiguous. During the conceptual design stage of the bridge health monitoring system of Shanghai Yangtze River Bridge, the research group faces this problem again. In this paper, a reliability assessment oriented bridge health monitoring system design procedure is proposed to address this problem. Concerning that the structures of different geometries and layouts will be of different mechanical behaviour, structural static and dynamic analysis under extreme loadings was conducted firstly. Based on this analysis, structural critical components and sections were obtained. Through the successive monitoring of the corresponding components and sections, structural health and performance can be ensured. This procedure is adopted in the design stage of the health monitoring system of Shanghai Yangtze River Bridge. This paper presents the details.