Continuous monitoring is essential to ensure the structural integrity of buildings and infrastructure. This process involves three critical subsystems: sensor devices, data transmission, and analysis. Structural monitoring ensures safety and efficiency by identifying and addressing issues.
Regular structural monitoring allows engineers to identify possible difficulties and respond quickly. It helps reduce the need for costly repairs and extends the structure’s useful life.
Real-Time Data Collection
Regarding structural monitoring building, real-time data is a powerful tool for decision-making. Real-time data is information available as soon as it is created or obtained, which is forwarded to users immediately. It is crucial to ensure that decision-making can be done in the moment. It is at the heart of everything from e-commerce transactions to GPS tracking to the COVID-19 maps that have emerged during the pandemic. Understanding how real-time data processing works can help you understand the benefits of this type of technology and when it may be necessary for your application.
Data Analysis
The data collected from the instrumentation are stored and retrieved for analysis and interpretation. The data is then used to detect problems and make informed decisions regarding structural safety and maintenance.
SHM helps increase structural and user safety, reduce uncertainty associated with actual field structural conditions and responses, detect damages at the early stages of their initiation, encourage innovative materials, improve understanding of field structural behavior, and develop rational management strategies for bridge engineering under uncertainty.
The system enables condition-based maintenance inspections in place of schedule-driven ones. It also provides information on the structure’s state, identifies progressive deterioration trends, and allows for estimating the remaining useful life of structures based on their actual condition.
Alerts
Using SHM systems to monitor the health of buildings and bridges makes identifying issues and even preventing structural failures possible. The system works by recording the parameters that reflect structural behaviors over time (permanently or continuously, in the short, middle, and long term), transforming them into information about the condition and performance of structures, and finally, transmitting this data to a device that can generate alerts, notifications, or reports on structural health conditions.
For example, monitoring crack patterns could be a valuable indicator of future damage in historical structures subjected to environmental degradation and micro-seismic vibrations. This information can be acquired through a plastic tell-tale fixed over the crack or a more advanced and accurate technique such as photogrammetry.
Other sensors, such as inclinometers, accelerometers, vibration, displacement, and linear crack meters, can monitor mechanical damage caused by earthquakes and unpredictable events or during everyday use. Real-time information from these sensors allows for construction control and enables a shift towards condition-based maintenance rather than schedule-driven inspections.
Reports
During its lifetime, structures are constantly subjected to environmental stressors that affect structural integrity. These can include seismic activity, micro-seismic vibrations from operation & maintenance, and unforeseen foundation settlement. Structural monitoring helps detect such damage and improve the performance of structures by making informed inspection & maintenance decisions.
SHM sensors provide information on a structure’s global and local strain state, making it useful for detecting damage. This data can be used to evaluate structures’ structural health, enabling early detection of mechanical damage.
SHM sensor data can also help modify significant infrastructure projects’ design assumptions.