An integrated structural health monitoring system for the Xijiang high-speed railway arch bridge

Compared with the highway bridges, the relatively higher requirement on the safety and comfort of vehicle makes the high-speed railway (HSR) bridges need to present enhanced dynamic performance. To this end, installing a health monitor system (HMS) on selected key HSR bridges has been widely applied. Typically, the HSR takes fully enclosed operation model and its skylight time is very short, which means that it is not easy to operate the acquisition devices and download data on site. However, current HMS usually involves manual operations, which makes it inconvenient to be used for the HSR. Hence, a HMS named DASP-MTS (Data Acquisition and Signal Processing - Monitoring Test System) that integrates the internet, cloud computing (CC) and virtual instrument (VI) techniques, is developed in this study. DASP-MTS can realize data acquisition and transmission automatically. Furthermore, the acquired data can be timely shared with experts from various locations to deal with the unexpected events. The system works in a Browser/Server frame so that users at any places can obtain real-time data and assess the health situation without installing any software. The developed integrated HMS has been applied to the Xijiang high-speed railway arch bridge. Preliminary analysis results are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the DASP-MTS as applied to the HSR bridges. This study will provide a reference to design the HMS for other similar bridges.