The ability to track the structural condition of existing structures is one of the main concerns of bridge owners and operators. In the context of bridge maintenance programs, visual inspection predominates nowadays as the primary source of information. Yet, visual inspections alone are insufficient to satisfy the current needs for safety assessment. From this perspective, extensive research on structural health monitoring has been developed in recent decades. However, the transfer rate from laboratory experiments to real-case applications is still unsatisfactory. This paper addresses the main limitations that slow the deployment and the acceptance of real-size structural health monitoring systems (SHM) and presents a novel real-time analysis algorithm based on random variable correlation for condition monitoring. The proposed algorithm was designed to respond automatically to detect unexpected events, such as local structural failure, within a multitude of random dynamic loads. The results are part of a project on SHM, where a high sensor-count monitoring system based on long-gauge fiber Bragg grating sensors (LGFBG) was installed on a prestressed concrete bridge in Neckarsulm, Germany. The authors also present the data management system developed to handle a large amount of data, and demonstrate the results from one of the implemented post-processing methods, the principal component analysis (PCA). The results showed that the deployed SHM system successfully translates the massive raw data into meaningful information. The proposed real-time analysis algorithm delivers a reliable notification system that allows bridge managers to track unexpected events as a basis for decision-making.
Keywords: FBG sensors; damage detection; structural health monitoring.