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Resilience of infrastructure systems through coupled energy harvesting and sensing network for bridge infrastructure

Countries worldwide experience insufficient resilience and safety of bridge infrastructure. The reason for this development is multi-fold. (a) The criticality of cracks and zero damage tolerance: In regard to steel infrastructure for example, occurrence of a macrocrack requires instantaneous repair. (b) Primary damage source for fatigue damage are trucks and their occurrence on streets in the US as well as worldwide is expected to further increase since trucks are most convenient and efficient transportation service from the perspective of logistics. (c) The maintenance efforts undertaken are not sufficient. While 1% of the bridge costs have to be reinvested annually in maintenance in order to fight aging and fatigue damage and maintain a constant bridge condition, the reinvested maintenance is in fact only about a quarter of the required maintenance. (d) No continuous monitoring of bridge condition in place, but instead 2-year interval inspections as required by NBIS. This paper introduces a fully automated sensing network optimized for bridge infrastructure, monitoring damage initiation and growth in critical bridge components and simultaneously collecting data on truck load frequency and total weight. The data enable direct correlation of damage growth with load information, providing new insights and experimental evidence of system performance. The paper presents in detail the self-powered intermittent sensing technology, quantifies the spatial resolution and detection sensitivity during sensing of internal damage and cracking, addresses the cyber-physical challenges in regard to data transmission and evaluation, and emphasizes the strength of the coupled energy harvesting and sensing network through laboratory and real world infrastructure testing.

Author(s):

Marcus Rutner    
Stevens Institute of Technology (CEOE Department)
United States