Road bridges in remote mining locations are frequented by a wide variety of Heavy Vehicles and Over Size Over Mass (OSOM) vehicles that support the mining industry. Monitoring bridge structure dynamic responses to different loads, vehicle categories, and vehicle speeds participates in providing actionable insights to optimise vehicle load limits, vehicle speed restrictions, and the safety of the bridge structures.
A permanent bridge structure monitoring system was developed and deployed to monitor the response of a remote bridge to different vehicle categories, loads, and speeds. The monitoring system includes strain gauges at critical locations on the structure, a traffic camera for vehicle identification purposes, streamlined cloud upload, data processing, and a web-based dashboard. The bridge structure monitoring system successfully (i) assigns an event with a structural response; (ii) performs statistical analysis and identifies correlations between vehicle categories, loads, speed, and the dynamic bridge structural response; (iii) captures outlier events; (iv) provides long-term structural changes due usage patterns and other factors.
This presentation will provide an overview of the monitoring system hardware and software, including (a) new technologies and innovations that were implemented and (b) the custom cloud computing solution that was developed to analyse large volumes of data. We will discuss the findings and the potential application of this bridge structure monitoring and analysis methodology to other scenarios.
