A New Type of Intelligent Wireless Sensing Network for Health Monitoring of Long Span Bridges

Structural health monitoring of long span bridges is important for the safety and maintenance of bridges. In this paper, a new type of wireless monitoring network is proposed for monitoring large span bridges. Hardware design and software architecture of the wireless monitoring system are introduced. The wireless monitoring network has a two-level cluster-tree architecture. The software and network architectures proposed emphasize the distributed computational capacity for parallel data processing in the network wireless monitoring network so as to reduce the amount of data transmission. A distributed computing strategy for modal identification of large span bridges is proposed. Numerical example of distribute computing the modal properties of three-span continuous beam illustrates the distributed out-put only modal identification algorithm based on NExT and ERA techniques. The distributed computing strategy can be incorporated into the new wireless monitoring network for automated modal identification of large span bridges.