A multi-sensing monitoring system to study deterioration of a railway bridge

This study presents a multi-sensing monitoring system recently installed in a Victorian railway viaduct in Leeds, UK. The viaduct is in continuous use since its construction during the 19th century and suffers extensive cracking due to the combined action of increased train loads and environmental effects. The bridge was retrofitted in 2015 and there was the need to assess the effectiveness of the intervention and better understand the ongoing deterioration process. For this reason, a multi-sensing system was designed that comprises a fibre Bragg grating network to measure distributed dynamic deformation across three arch spans of the bridge, acoustic emission sensors to detect rates of cracking, and high sensitivity accelerometers to study the dynamic response at critical locations. The system is self-sustaining, self-powered and remotely controlled, and uses an algorithm that combines information from the three different types of sensors to track variations of response parameters of the bridge over time.